Plowing the Dark - Softcover

Powers, Richard; Richard, Powers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312280122 ISBN 13: 9780312280123

Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL, 2001

Synopsis

"Mention Richard Powers' name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence."--Sven Birkerts, Esquire

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this inventive novel to coalesce.

Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. As her ex-husband lies dying and the outbreak of computerized war fills her with a sense of guilty complicity, Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, were she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong.

On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. Without distraction or hope of release, he must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion. Plowing the Dark is fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save.

About this title

Review:

In Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers returns to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. No one who enjoyed his remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised by this. Here, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern". TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marvelling that

their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.

Powers' lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it suggests that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com

Review:

"Superb...Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature...daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful."--Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World

"A fiercely visual book...the effect is spectacular...The most visceral prose Powers has ever written."--Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review

"America's most ambitious novelist...Plowing The Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete. No one who becomes immersed in its poetry will walk out the way he or she came in."--Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Plowing The Dark may be [Powers's] most finely executed story yet...Relentless and mesmerizing...a beautiful homage to the sine qua non of consciousness itself...the final triumph of art over pain."--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"Powers has an inventive, virtuosic writing style that reserves him a special category in today's fiction...I don't have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing The Dark...This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration."--Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

"[A] tour de force. It has overwhelming inventiveness and fun moments as well."--Donald Newlove, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is, ultimately, a novel of ideas, but one with a soul...There is much to admire in this novel, particularly the ingenious way in which reality is captured."--Scott Leibs, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Full of intelligence, exacting analysis and supple prose...[a] magisterial storybook."--Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal

"Powers' twin tales are rife with echoes and allusions that reinforce their shared concern with the ways in which we reinvent our worlds."--Ralph Rugoff, LA Weekly

"Superb...perhaps [Powers'] greatest novel...Nearly every page of Powers' astonishing book has stunning ideas that will force you to re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about these subjects, and the implications you never imagined."--Steven Moore, The Newark Star-Ledger

"Powers displays his trademark intellectual richness...His prose makes technology sing and music compute."--Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312280122
• ISBN 13: 9780312280123
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400