Book Review: GALATEA 2.2 by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The weight of glory. The sheer mass of beautiful passages in only three hundred pages. I suspect this novel was the author's way of getting through a mid-life crisis, two heartbreaks, as well as a mild form of writer's block, but oh, what a flex of literary virtuosity!

What if I type up my autobiography until my thirty-sixth year, and insert a fiction which is a literary mass of my profound reflections on the internet and artificial intelligence? Richard Powers must have thought to himself, and proceeded to do just that. His protagonist in the fiction work is named after him, and has even written books with the exact same titles, same plotlines. Life gives him a plum job for a year in a university where he gets embroiled in a scheme along with other professors and scientists: Can humans train a computer to pass the Turing test, by teaching it to be human through exposure to the best of our art, music, and literature?

Supposing this is Richard Powers at his worst, he is still sooooo good! This was my fourth novel by the same author of BEWILDERMENT and OVERSTORY, and the quality of his thoughts and writing is so marvelous, I shall do my best to slowly collect all his books over the course of my lifetime. To read Powers is to have him "explain in miniature where history had left me." He gives us The Big Picture, and asks hard questions about the nature of humanity in a landscape that is becoming increasingly and alarmingly soul-less, only we are too caught up in it to realize.

Written in 1995, Powers meditated on the twin wonders/terrors of the internet and technology:

"I thought: a person might be able to make a life in all that etherspace... debates flowed without beginning or end, through tributaries and meanderings, responses to responses to responses... the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange... the web began to seem a vast silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program... and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it..."

Galatea, after all, was shaped by the sculptor Pygmalion. In a way, that's what all parents, all teachers are. And that's what fascinates me the most about this book: the detailed curriculum of a lifetime, with the aim of producing the most human AI possible, fed to the computer... the construction of a soul in a year.

Along the way, Powers muses on the power and limits of art, the supremacy of the lived human experience, and the fragile and hurtful nature of human love.

I also love how he writes about music, one of the most difficult things to do! He writes "how a sonata layered itself like a living hierarchy," of how the Clarinet Concerto K# 622's middle movement was "the most pained palliative in creation...the clarinet and orchestra exchanged phrases, elaborating on the ongoing expansion, unfolding, inhaling beyond capacity like the lungs of a patriarch wedging open the air after being told of the death of his last great-grandchild. The endless phrase spoke of how you reach an age where anything you might answer would not be worth asking. Who in all this restless measurement had time for so infinite an aside" for such "hopeless peace... a grace too huge and slow for understanding?"

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