Replication and identity are themes in the work of UI alumnus and faculty member Richard Powers, a novelist who melds scientific information with storytelling. (Photos: Jane Kuntz)

By Mary Timmins

Among the signature stories about Richard Powers ’78 LAS, AM ’80 LAS, is one about how he spent a year without talking – a story that, as it turns out, isn’t quite accurate.

“I did live in relative isolation for the better part of 10 months,” Powers said. “Basically, my days, the ordinary days, would consist of waking up, taking a walk in the woods, writing … reading for six hours and then falling asleep and waking up and doing it all again.” Inhabiting a remote house on Long Island, the novelist went for weeks without human contact, the better to write “Plowing the Dark,” in which a character is held in solitary confinement as a hostage in Beirut. When his captors finally give him a book, Powers said, the character is filled with “this emotionally devastating sense of how lucky we are to see the workings of anybody else’s mind.”

For those who have seen the workings of his mind, Powers is a writer like no other. Over the past 22 years he has produced nine novels that enthrall and educate, underpinning powerful tales of brave, flawed people with intense passages, improbably lyrical, devoted to understanding the world from a scientific standpoint.

“We think we’re a solid thing, we think we’re continuous, we think memory is reliable,” he said, speaking in the resonant, measured tones that evince his lifelong love of music, “when in fact it’s all stories.”

Powers’ stories are long ones – from 350-plus pages for “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance” (his first, published in 1985) to “The Gold Bug Variations,” which at 639 pages enters the realm of Marcel Proust, Powers’ prolific French idol. Most readers being unequal to such heft, the best-seller lists of the last two decades have reared up and crested and crashed without Powers riding them. Instead he has gone unspectacularly about amassing a crowd of loyal readers and an enlightened fraternity of honors, topped up by the National Book Award, which he bore home from New York in May. Powers won for “The Echo Maker,” of which a reviewer said that Powers’ “philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.” In the novel, the fabulous spectacle of sandhill cranes on Nebraska’s Platte River – enormous creatures with red heads, whose annual mass incursion there Powers witnessed a few years ago, quite by chance on a late-winter, cross-country road trip – gives wing to a heady tale in which a young man suffers a strange form of amnesia that causes him to believe that those close to him are imposters. Of the fragility of identity and the sense of self, Powers writes in “The Echo Maker”:

What was truth, compared to survival? Floating or broken or split or a third of a second behind, something still insisted: Me. Always the water changed, but the river stood still.

The self was a painting, traced on that liquid surface.

Chapter 1: Sketching the present
A resident of Urbana and a member of the English faculty at the University of Illinois since 1992, Powers is tall, with straight brown hair, a physique reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s and a predilection for T-shirts and backpacks. Cranking about on the 10-speed bicycle he rides everywhere – a vintage Sorrento, pedaled down a decade – he could pass for a grad student in some forbidding discipline, like genomics or game theory or brain research, about all of which he has, in fact, written. Formerly an occupant of the University’s prestigious Swanlund Chair and a fellow at the UI Center for Advanced Study, Powers holds an appointment at the Beckman Institute, an Oz-like research enclave of copper, brick and reflective green glass at the north end of the engineering campus, where people simulate multi-dimensional, computer-generated worlds and work on artificial intelligences and talk about this stuff over coffee in the sunlit, steel-glinting atrium.

Asked what he does there, Powers said, “I listen.”

Chapter 2: Wherein the writer experiences early reversals
It’s been a long loop round back to Illinois, Powers having arrived here first in the autumn of 1975, borne by full-freshman plans to become a physicist.

His had been an unremarkable childhood – unremarkable as it gets, anyway, for a kid who actually likes to play the cello and whose idea of a good read is “Voyage of the Beagle” by Charles Darwin – until his family moved to Thailand in 1968, living in Bangkok for five years. The experience, coinciding with the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, affected him “in ways,” Powers said, “that I really can’t even calculate.” Return to high school in America, as a senior in DeKalb, produced “a sense of being an outsider that never really went away.”

Then, moving on to the U of I and what he envisioned as the laboratories of his future, he found his agenda confounded by Robert Schneider, the late Freudian critic who taught Powers’ freshman honors seminar in English. Advising him to consider instead a career as a writer, Schneider pushed Powers into a turn, hard south down the Quad and toward something very like a destiny in a very random world. The young man forsook physics for rhetoric. He graduated in the top 3 percent of his college at Illinois, winning the distinction of Bronze Tablet scholar. He went on to a master’s degree in literature.

And then on.

Chapter 3: A Richard Powers geography
One of Powers’ favorite quotations – used as a leitmotif in his fifth novel, “Galatea 2.2,” is from the Psalms: “We live our lives as a tale told.”

For Powers, the past is a series of stories, and those stories reflect a series of selves, each self shaping around the pressures and pleasures of the present and also around the selves of others. For Powers, we are all composed of serial selves. “The reason we like to read books,” he explained, “is because we’re trying to make sense of our lives.” And, as do many writers, Powers reflects and refracts his own selves in his writing.

In 1980, armed with his master’s degree and computer skills, Powers moved to Boston and found work as a technical writer and programmer. Wandering the city in his off hours, he collided one day with a fateful picture, taken in 1914 by German photographer August Sander and on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, walking into its imagery as into a movie that told a story he couldn’t shake. Powers quit his job and tore into his first novel, titled for the photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.”

Described by one reviewer as a “structural masterpiece,” the novel uses a complex, multi-level plot to balance questions about the ethics and implications of industrial mass production against the German rape of Belgium in World War I; the pursuit of an alluring, mysterious redheaded woman; and the quest for identity by a character who happens to be a technical writer and programmer from Boston.

Upon completing “Three Farmers,” Powers himself was to go in pursuit of a woman, following her from Boston to the Netherlands in 1987. He ended up living in Drielandenpunt (a tiny triangle between Germany and Belgium), learning Dutch and composing what, paradoxically, he considers to be the “most American” of his novels: “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a work that hurls game theory, Disney and nuclear warfare at the reader in a narrative that one reviewer likened to a set of nested dolls.

Busy on his next novel, Powers recalled that, one afternoon, “the phone rang, and I picked it up fully expecting to be speaking Dutch.” Instead, a voice from Chicago was telling Powers that he’d just been named a MacArthur Fellow, an award celebrated for putting budding geniuses together with big-time mad money: $100,000 a year for five years. For Powers, the fellowship “was a godsend.”

“The upshot was that it made me decide to make ‘Gold Bug Variations’ the most ambitious and the wildest book that I had tried to do yet,” he said. And indeed, “Gold Bug” has impelled critical praise on the order of “dazzling,” “amazing” and “demanding.” A massive tour de force, the novel builds on the elegant conceit that the rich patterns that derive from a simple bass line in Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” resemble the endless genetic variety spun out of the four-base code sequences of DNA. Balancing three plots in three time periods with extensive, gorgeously worded scientific material, Powers takes a flying leap into the very meaning of life – genetic diversity.

Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none.

In one of the novel’s subplots, a character travels to the Netherlands and lives there for an extended period. Another, about the race by researchers in the ’50s to crack the genetic code, is set on the campus of the University of Illinois. And it was to the U of I that destiny or luck or whatever force drives the selves of Richard Powers was shortly to transport him.

Chapter 4: Wherein the writer returns to Illinois
“The interesting thing for me is – I seem to have been very well looked after somehow,” Powers said. “I feel as if the amount of recognition, both critically and commercially, for my books has grown at just the right rate for me to keep working in an interesting way and to keep taking chances with the books and to keep trying to reinvent what I think I want to try to do in a novel each time out.”

In 1992, returning to the U.S. from the Netherlands via England, where he stopped off at Cambridge University for six months as a visiting scholar, Powers made the rounds of visits through Boston and the Midwest. He had resolved to live somewhere out West. The Urbana campus was supposed to be his last stop en route to Arizona. Flagstaff was looking good or maybe Tucson. On the eve of departure, the chairman of the English department found Powers and surprised him with a query: What would it take to keep him around?

Sustenance and shelter – the needs were simple. So the novelist stayed on, fed by a residence-hall meal pass and housed in an apartment at the Orchard Downs graduate student complex. He wrote, spoke, worked with students. “Operation Wandering Soul,” his fourth novel, got nominated for the National Book Award. “It was a wonderful year,” Powers said. And when his time was up, as he prepared once more to take his leave of Illinois, the English department came up with a new offer – a Swanlund Chair, the University’s most prestigious faculty position.

Chapter 5: “We live our lives as a tale told”
Life in the Midwest has long settled into its own tempo for Powers. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program, which he helped establish at the University in 2002. He has won a reputation for amiability and accommodation and straight-on kindness, advising students, helping colleagues and getting involved in endeavors that have ranged from supporting a recent conference about poetry and the law to writing lyrics for a song cycle about Robert Scott’s doomed 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Powers continues to ride his beloved bike all over town, shuttling between the English Building and Beckman, and visiting friends, of whom he has many. In May 2001, he married Jane Kuntz, AM ’96 LAS, PHD ’02 LAS, a former Peace Corps worker who had lived in Tunisia for 20 years before coming to Illinois for a doctorate in French.

 He works six to eight hours a day on composing and revising his next and 10th novel, destined to deal with cloning, the science of creating selves from selves. And indeed, an important theme – perhaps even the important theme – that emerges from the body of Powers’ work is replication. From the mechanical reproduction explored in “Three Farmers” to the self-organizing, infinite wonders of the recombinant DNA of “The Gold Bug Variations” to the identities, parallel and serial, generated by the “three pound infinity” of the brain described in “The Echo Maker,” Powers explores again and again myriad, frequently wondrous, sometimes evil and often unknowable ways in which life adapts by serial mimicry.

On a campus neck-deep in gray matter, where Ph.D.s may routinely be found behind reception desks and researchers create towering silos of specialized knowledge, Richard Powers is an anomaly, a man apart. He seems to magically have walked the University rooftops from Swanlund Chair to Center for Advanced Study to Beckman Institute, with quiet, self-effacing ease. His is that rare mind that thinks analytically and interprets passionately, fashioning from science new ways in which we can understand ourselves. “The self is a fiction,” he said. “But it’s a real fiction, and however ad hoc or improvised or makeshift that process of reassembling ourselves in the face of our atomization – it’s all we can do.”

Beyond the geographic iterations that have shaped him and his work, there seem to be two essential selves of Richard Powers – the researcher and the artist, wrapped in one (to snatch a Powers title here) wandering soul.