This is why I love Richard Powers

A few weeks back I dropped by my favorite used bookstore in the city and prowled around for some Powers books I haven’t read. I settled on Operation Wandering Soul. Here’s an excerpt from early on in it.

Something about him must emanate this Mr. Potato Head plasticity. Chief of Surgery Burgress, dying a slow, half-century death in this city where reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn, instantly imagines that in Kraft he has found a kindred literate spirit, a simile son. Dr. Purgative, as Plummer rechristens him, keeps farming out these convoluted, espitemological novels by Kraft’s obscure, young contemporaries. Plow through and report on, over sherry this afternoon, a postmodernist mystery thicker than the Index Medicus where the butler kills the author and kidnaps the narration. Damn thing includes its own explanatory Cliffs Notes halfway through, although the gloss is even more opaque than the story. What the hell; it’s a break from booking for the next wave of board exams.

I smiled much while reading that. It’s extra juicy sweet because I first discovered Powers through a rather postmodernist trip of a book of his that actually references the plot of the one I’m reading now. Cute, no?

For the record, the first book by Powers I read was Galatea 2.2—read a thoroughly competent, and thus not overly flattering, review here. A small quote regarding Powers’s writing style:

Galatea 2.2 isn’t verbally dense in the way that, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses are, requiring a semester of study just to wade through the mud-thick pool of rhetoric; still, it manages to be extraordinarily complex in the way that Powers spins his words into complicated webs. It’s not quite verbal masturbation, but a precise, intricate sort of narration that is both constantly self-referential and maddeningly allusory.

Word.