Generosity [Hardcover]

The American novelist Richard Powers is one of those writers who straddles both commercial and critical success. His last novel - his ninth, Echomaker - won the US National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer, while his other works have gathered armfuls of other awards and acclaim. Generosity, his tenth novel, published in the UK in January 2010, comes emblazoned with praise for his work from the likes of Margaret Atwood writing in the NY Review of Books and the late John Updike in the NY Times, while the accompanying blurb is equally full of plaudits.

Powers blends fast-paced, action-packed storylines with intelligence and a ferocious imagination. In Generosity he tackles the world of genetic engineering. The novel is set in current time but in a parallel world, one in which 20% of human genes have already been patented. Russell Stone is a failed writer whose brief glimpse of fame faded when he realised the unforseen human consequences of his cutting articles: he toned his work down to avoid hurting more people but was deemed to have lost his bite. He is now working as a ghost writer for a confessional website while teaching part-time. When he embarks on his new course as lecturer in an evening class on writing, he is mystified by an Algerian woman in his class. Thassa is a twenty three year-old refugee who has tragically lost both her parents and experienced brutality first-hand in her home country. Yet she is so full of natural radiance that everyone around her is magnetised.

Simultaneously, Thomas Kurton, a famous geneticist is toiling away at his research. He has previously produced transgenic cows which produce milk containing proteins capable of curing some human illness. His most recent work is isolating the genes responsible for happiness. Thassa inevitably becomes embroiled in the hunt for the chromosomal key to human joy, and her life changes irrevocably.

I am the wrong person to review any adventure novel leave alone one based in the murky world of science, combining as I do an aversion to adventure/events-driven fiction with cynicism. My love is for books which centre around people rather than events. But I recognise that Powers creates tight, well-researched populist fiction. In Generosity, Powers parodies the concept of the omniscient narrator: so many commercially successful writers use the third person narrative in an all-knowing way, lazily telling us details about characters that they could easily have conveyed through the story. Powers turns this on its head by employing a first person narrator we're really aware of, one who makes his presence known by passing comments on the characters( eg on Russell: 'He's just thirty-two, I know, although he seems much older') and yet who is blatantly not a character in the story himself. So as well as knowing all about the characters, the narrator reads over Russell's shoulder, declares that he has a photocopy of the document Russell is holding, and so on. This device is odd and a little disconcerting, and at times feels knowing and pedantic, but it's certainly original and has the desired effect of evoking discomfort.

My main problem with Generosity was in the implausibility of the precept that everyone adores Thassa. I have no problem with the fact that some people are unnaturally joyful whatever life throws at them, nor with the idea that these people are universally loved (although it has to be said that many people are irritated by Polyanna types, seeing them as foolish/shallow or, worse, messianic and beatific.) No, it was more with the creation of Thassa. I didn't find her magnetic or lovable. The trouble with novelists creating enigmatic characters is that they usually have to show the reader why the character is so intriguing by giving examples of what they do and say. And Thassa doesn't come across as the adorable person she's meant to be. Her essays about Algeria are certainly upbeat and chirpy, but her interactions with others left me tepid. At one point Russell asks Thassa how she's coping with the local Arabophobia. She grins and replies that she's not an Arab but a Kabyle, then says that Russell's surname is a good Arab name when translated, adding 'Hey! Are you planning any terror, Mister?' While this is a valiant attempt to expose the racist stereotypes many people have (dark skin=Arab=terrorist), it's clumsy and Thassa's 'quip' wouldn't garner more than a lame smile in real life. But in the story, people are mesmerised by her. Another time, during a student assessment, Russell is advising Thassa while she scribbles away in her note book. He assumes she's taking notes but after a while she turns the page to show him a cartoon of him. Taddaa! How many teachers would be charmed by this, as Russell obviously is, and how many infuriated/irked? There isn't even the excuse that Thassa is beautiful - in real life, however unfair it is, beautiful people often manage to hypnotise others and are sometimes attributed positive personality characteristics because of their physical beauty. This isn't the case with Thassa.

Still, this is a small nit in an otherwise accomplished work. The scientific research is impressive, with the psychologists and doctors sounding plausible on the brain chemistry of and genetic predisposition to happiness. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Thassa's home country, Algeria, is also convincingly portrayed, as is Russell's growing obsession with this rootless refugee who confounds his expectations by remaining chipper in the face of terrible adversity. I'm prepared to accept that the reason I wasn't seduced is because it's a genre I'm not keen on, but those readers who are drawn to imaginative thrillers which explore the potential results of science taken to extremes may find this a compelling work.

In Generosity, Richard Powers takes us back into the world of genetic science so wonderfully explored in his novel, The Gold Bug Variations. Generosity is Powers tenth novel in which he continues his grand scheme of bringing together the arts and the sciences. But this should not suggest that the novels are alike. Take the last three novels, The Time of our Singing among other things saw Powers exploring race, music and time, The Echo Maker combines a look at the impact of Capgras Syndrome with concerns about the environment and in Generosity genetic engineering in the form of a search for a happiness gene is combined with a dazzling exploration of the scope and nature of writing both fiction and non-fiction.

Generosity is a novel that is thin on plot and great characterization. These are not its purpose. So with tongue in cheek a brief synopsis of the story is as follows. Mr Powers runs two parallel stories together before dove tailing them. A failed writer, Russell Stone, turns to teaching "creative non-fiction" at an art college, where he meets the central character, Thassadit Amzwar an Algerian who has a propensity to display happiness. Thassadit soon becomes the centre of attraction for just about everyone who wants to gain the capacity for being happy most of the times. But more crucially geneticist, Thomas Kurton, who happens to be doing research into gene therapy, learns about Thassadit's condition and of course pursues her in a quest to ascertain if her happiness is derived from her genes. Fleshing out the story are two couples Russell Stone and Candace Weld, and Thomas Kurton and Tonia Schiff. Stuck among them causing happiness or more ironically angst is Thassadit. The time period is contemporary and the setting is mainly Chicago but sometimes moving to Tunisia. The narrative device is inventive.

Powers dabbles with an interesting narrative technique. The story is essentially told by the first person - an omniscient first person. But Powers allows the narrative to flow as if there is no narrator or at least he gives the appearance of switching to the third person narrator. All the while it is the first person voice we hear who at times clearly appears in the narrative as observer and story teller.

In places Powers style is fluent and brilliant. His sentences are sometimes arresting. Here is an example where he is describing the thought process of a novelist, Nobel laureate, who is having a debate with the scientist Thomas Kurton: "The writer's thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on." Or where he uses refreshing metaphor to describe the feelings of one of his main characters, Candace: "She trembles and tears up. But her shoulders and torso remain strangely marble." Furthermore, Powers text is in parts one that can only be describe as meta-fiction. I can't remember anywhere else in fiction, apart from Proust, where the writer so explicitly stands back from the text and examine its process and nature. The character Kurton, "praises the long mysterious journey of literature" and Powers have him tell us that: "Imaginative writing has always been the engine of future facts."

So if the novel is thin on plot and characterization, what is its raison d'etre? Like many of Powers previous novels, Generosity dwells in the realms of ideas. What makes the ideas Powers set out to explore relevant to the non-intellectual is that they are about the basic stuff of life. At the start of part two of the novel, Powers has an ethicists, Anne Harter, and the geneticist, Thomas Kurton, debate the issue of the value of aging in a context of scarce resources. The issue here is relevant to all of us: do we want to use genetics to keep the affluent in the first world living longer? Or should we allow people to age naturally and die creating a more equal opportunity for the masses across the world to share its resources?

More down to earth, on one level Generosity works as, let's say a minor thriller. Thomas Kurton becomes so embroiled with Thassadit's capacity for happiness that he goes off on a quest to find its source. But Powers is also looking ahead to the possibilities of gene technology. So on another level the novel satirize the present and future generations for what Powers expects will be their vanity in the application of genetics. In an interview session Powers has Tonia Schiff, a science journalist, ask Kurton: "Is it true that a California woman has mortgaged her house to raise the $50,000 needed to bring her dog back from the dead?" In the future age that Powers envisage, Kurton's response to Tonia Schiff is laced with irony. He answers: "A lot of us might be willing to pay as much for meaningful connection with another living thing."

If the novel is about exploring the contemporary human condition, rather than mere unimaginative biographical and historical forays, then Richard Powers has his finger on the pulse of what drives our contemporary human condition. Ranging from the current state of the arts in a world dominated by the quick pace of IT and modern technology to the basic substance of what makes us sentient beings, Mr Powers fiction is highly imaginative, perhaps a little dry, and relevant to our times.

What Powers has done in this novel is peer into a future world where the current research genome project has come to fruition and is applied in the new world. We get both a positive and negative glimpse of such a world. The means by which Powers show us his highly imaginative world is both exciting to follow and at times demanding but it is worth the effort.

A fascinating book in search of the happiness gene but in order to fully understand it some knowledge of Genetics, American business practice, the structure of a novel, the arts and media as well as the Algerian War would be helpful. There are several threads in this book so difficult to grasp in one reading but still worthwhile.