Generosity: An Enhancement - Hardcover

Powers, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374161143 ISBN 13: 9780374161149

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ECHO MAKER, A PLAYFUL AND PROVOCATIVE NOVEL ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAPPINESS GENE


When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won't someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell's amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa's spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa's joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.

Russell and Candace, now lovers, fail to protect Thassa from the growing media circus. Thassa's congenital optimism is soon severely tested. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the country at large.

What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and finally magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Powers is the author of nine novels. The Echo Maker (FSG, 2006) won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction. He lives in Illinois.

Reviews

Hailed as Powers's most accessible work to date by the Denver Post and, conversely, as his most demanding novel thus far by the Washington Post, Generosity created a stir among critics. While Newsday protested the throng of subjects vying for readers' attention, others praised the complexity of Powers's novel of ideas. Critics also diverged over Powers's characters—"flesh-and-blood" (Denver Post) or "two-dimensional" (Los Angeles Times)—and his unnamed, postmodern narrator, who periodically interrupts the story to question readers' beliefs about the characters and plot. Despite these differences of opinion, all reviewers agreed that Generosity is a chilling and fascinating work that will provide readers with much food for thought.

Starred Review. About halfway into Powers's follow-up to his National Book Award–winning The Echo Maker, a Nobel Prize-winning author, during a panel discussion, talks about how genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature.... A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. This then, is a story with both. Its hero, at least initially, is Russell Stone, a failed author of creative nonfiction turned reluctant writing instructor who cannot help transmitting to his students something of his flagging faith in writing. One of them, a Berber Algerian named Thassadit Amzwar, is so possessed by preternatural happiness that she's nicknamed Miss Generosity by her prematurely jaded classmates and has emerged from the Algerian civil war that claimed the lives of her parents glowing like a blissed out mystic. After Stone learns that Thassadit may possess a rare euphoric trait called hyperthymia, her condition is upgraded from behavioral to genetic, and Powers's novel makes a dramatic shift when Thassadit falls into the hands of Thomas Kurton, the charismatic entrepreneur behind genetics lab Truecyte, whose plan to develop a programmable genome to regulate the brain's set point for well-being may rest in Miss Generosity's perpetually upbeat alleles. Much of the tension behind Powers's idea-driven novels stems from the delicate balance between plot and concept, and he wisely adopts a voice that is—sometimes painfully—aware of the occasional strain (I'm caught... starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction). Like Stone and Kurton, Powers strays from mere record to attempt an impossible task: to make the world right. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Sixteen years after Peter Kramer's "Listening to Prozac," Richard Powers has heard the alarming implications of treatments that let us buy better moods and personalities. His cerebral new novel offers a chilling examination of the life we're reengineering with our chromosomes and brain chemistry. Although it's tempting to call "Generosity" a dystopia about the pharmaceutical future in the tradition of Huxley's "Brave New World," Powers sticks so closely to the state of current medical science and popular culture that this isn't so much a warning as a diagnosis. And as with any frightening diagnosis, you'll be torn between denial and a desperate urge to talk about it. The story begins on a deceptively small scale: Russell Stone is a cynical young editor for a cheesy self-improvement magazine called Becoming You. He's still recovering from a brief period of fame when his witty personal essays were sought after by NPR and the New Yorker. But now, at 32, he spends his days translating saccharine testimonies of personal triumph into Standard English. Lonely and depressed, he jumps at the chance to teach a night class in creative nonfiction at a Chicago arts college. Everything in this provocative novel revolves around a mysterious student in Russell's class named Thassa Amzwar. She's an Algerian who came to Chicago by way of Paris and Montreal after losing her home and her parents "during the Time of Horrors." By any reasonable measure, she should be shellshocked or corroded with bitterness, but instead she's hypnotically happy, "the world's most blissful refugee," with a voice like "mountain flutes." Russell is immediately fascinated by her: "Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse. And Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic." Everybody in class soaks "in the glow of this woman, her eerie contentment." They quickly dub her "Miss Generosity," but Russell thinks she's "either on newly discovered antidepressants or so permanently traumatized she's giddy." Powers can write lovely and heartfelt stories (he won a National Book Award in 2006), but he also has a well-deserved reputation for brainy fiction (he won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1989), and "Generosity" may be his most demanding novel yet. It's told in a series of moments that run from just a paragraph to a few pages long, involving a triple-helix plot. In the main story line, Russell befriends Thassa and introduces her to a psychological counselor to make sure the young woman's striking happiness is not the manifestation of some mental illness. The three of them form a strange kind of support group, bound together in a dangerously ambiguous web of professional responsibility, love and sex. A second story line involves a jet-setting scientist named Thomas Kurton, who stays on the cutting edge of genetic research and, as much as possible, in front of a camera. This irrepressible entrepreneur joins the august company of such literary scientists as Drs. Faustus, Frankenstein and Rappaccini, but Powers's Dr. Kurton is also a dead ringer for the real-life vitamin-popping futurist Ray Kurzweil. "Vaguely messianic," Kurton oversees an ever-evolving galaxy of pharmaceutical companies, and he loves to electrify the public imagination with "ecstatic pieces about the coming transhuman age." From his first genetic breakthrough while a student at Stanford, he's been on a tear to revise the chemical composition of our genes to save us from mortality. For a price. Equal parts scientist and huckster, he tells adoring crowds: "The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide. Aging is not just a disease; it's the mother of all maladies. And humankind may finally have a shot at curing it." The thrust of the novel involves Dr. Kurton's discovery of Russell's elated student, Thassa. A series of innovative tests reveals that she possesses a unique genetic mutation that makes her permanently content, although the announcement of that discovery threatens to burn her life under a glare of toxic publicity. By using her genetic material, Dr. Kurton suggests he may be on the threshold of ridding humanity of despair, coding soma right into our chromosomes. In a country where 10 percent of us take antidepressants -- "Generosity" is packed with such startling factoids -- that could be the greatest breakthrough since penicillin. This seems like plenty of rich material for a relatively short novel, but Powers folds a third story line into the mix. As Russell struggles to guide Thassa through her interaction with Dr. Kurton, we also follow the work of the country's most popular science journalist, a savvy young woman named Tonia Schiff. What Powers makes so bracingly clear with Tonia's gradual disillusionment is that the scientific breakthroughs that alter the nature of humanity don't take place in the laboratory. These drugs and genetic techniques aren't fully born until they're packaged by the media and consumed by a distracted but passionate public. In a culture in which entertainment value is the highest value, all things -- including scientific truth -- must be hyped for mass consumption. One of the most depressingly realistic scenes shows flashy Dr. Kurton debating the benefits of genetic enhancement with a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Needless to say, the novelist's wise objections are blown to smithereens by the force of Dr. Kurton's shiny optimism. There's also a spot-on depiction of an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" about the latest psychological discoveries. A graphic reminder of the nuance-free way millions of people learn about complicated medical science, it's as funny as it is sobering. And to this fascinating mix, Powers dares to add a postmodern narrator who periodically breaks into the story to deconstruct readers' assumptions about characters and plot. "I'm caught like Buridan's ass," he writes, "starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable. . . . I know what kind of story I'd make from this one, if I could." It's easy to feel annoyed with this kind of authorial gamesmanship, particularly in a story that already boasts so many bells and whistles, but in the context of "Generosity," Powers's self-conscious narrator is brilliantly relevant. This is, after all, a novel about human beings attempting to design their own characters and, in a sense, narrate their own biological stories. With "Generosity," Powers has performed a dazzling cross-disciplinary feat, linking the slippery nature of "creative nonfiction" to the moral conundrums of genetic engineering. Although you might expect a novel so weighted with medical and philosophical arguments to flatten its characters into brittle stereotypes, ultimately that's the most impressive aspect of this meditation on happiness and humanness. As "Generosity" drives toward its surprising conclusion, these characters grow more complex and poignant, increasingly baffled by the challenge and the opportunity of remaking ourselves to our heart's content.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

GENEROSITY

AN ENHANCEMENTBy RICHARD POWERS

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Copyright © 2009 Richard Powers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-16114-9

Chapter One

A man rides backward in a packed subway car. This must be almost fall, the season of revision. I picture him in the thick of bequest, tunneling beneath the I Will City, the world's twenty-fifth biggest urban sprawl, one wedged in the population charts between Tianjin and Lima. He hums some calming mantra to himself, a song with the name Chicago in it, but the train drowns out the tune.

He's just thirty-two, I know, although he seems much older. I can't see him well, at first. But that's my fault, not his. I'm years away, in another country, and the El car is so full tonight that everyone's near invisible.

Look again: the whole point of heading out anywhere tonight. The blank page is patient, and meaning can wait. I watch until he solidifies. He cowers in the scoop seat, knees tight and elbows hauled in. He's dressed for being overlooked, in rust jeans, maroon work shirt, and blue windbreaker with broken zipper: the camouflage of the nonaligned, circa last year. He's as white as anyone on this subway gets. His own height surprises him. His partless hair waits for a reprimand and his eyes halt midway between hazel and brown. His face is about six centuries out of date. He would make a great Franciscan novice in one of those mysteries set in a medieval monastery.

He cups a bag of ratty books on his lap. No; look harder: a ruggedized plastic sack inscribed with bright harvest cornucopia that issues the trademarked slogan, Total Satisfaction ... plus so much more!

His spine curls in subway contrition, and his shoulders apologize for taking up any public space at all. His chin tests the air for the inevitable attack that might come from any direction. I'd say he's headed to his next last chance. He tries to give his seat to a young Latina in a nurse's uniform. She just smirks and waves him back down.

Early evening, four dozen feet below the City on the Make: every minute, the train tunnels underneath more humans than would fit in a fundamentalist's heaven. Aboveground, it must be rainy and already dark. The train stops and more homebound workers press in, trickling September drizzle. This is the fifth year since the number of people living in cities outstripped those who don't.

I watch him balance a yellow legal pad on his toppling book sack. He checks through the pages, curling each back over the top of the pad. The sheets fill with blocks of trim handwriting. Red and green arrows, nervous maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, swarm over the text.

A forest of straphangers hems him in. Many are wired for sound. A damp man next to him drips on his shoes. Humanity engulfs him: phone receptionists for Big Four accounting firms. Board of Trade pit bulls, burned out by twenty-eight. Market researchers who've spent days polling focus groups on the next generation of portable deionizers. Purveyors and contractors, drug dealers, number crunchers, busboys, grant writers. Just brushing against them in memory makes me panic.

Advertisements crown the car's walls: Outpsych your tyke. Want to know what makes the planet tick? Make your life just a little perfecter. Every few minutes, a voice calls over the speakers: "If you observe any suspicious behavior or unattended packages ..."

I force my eyes back down over the scribbler's left shoulder, spying on his notes. The secret of all imagination: theft. I stare at his yellow legal pages until they resolve. They're full of lesson plans.

I know this man. He's been fished from the city's adjunct-teacher pool, an eleventh-hour hire, still working on his first night's class even as the train barrels toward his South Loop station. The evidence is as clear as his all-caps printing: ethics has wrecked his life, and this fluke part-time night job is his last hope for rehabilitation. He never expected to land such a plum again. Death and resurrection: I know this story, like I wrote it myself.

The train wags, he pitches in his seat, and I don't know anything. I stop deciding and return to looking. A heading on the top of his pad's first page reads: Creative Nonfiction 14, Sect. RS: Journal and Journey.

A heavy teen in a flak jacket bumps him. He squeezes out a retreating smile. Then he resumes drawing red arrows, even now, two subway stops from his first night's class. As I always say: It's never too late to overprepare. His pen freezes in midair; he looks up. I glance away, caught spying. But his hand just hovers. When I look back, he's the one who's spying on someone else.

He's watching a dark-haired boy across the aisle, a boy with a secret quickening in his hands. Something yellow floats on the back of the boy's curled fist. His two knuckles pin a goldfinch by the ankles. The boy quiets the bird, caressing in a foreign tongue.

My adjunct's hand holds still, afraid that his smallest motion will scatter this scene. The boy sees him looking, and he hurries the bird back into a bamboo cylinder. My spy flushes crimson and returns to his notes.

I watch him shuffle pages, searching for a passage in green highlighter that reads First Assignment. The words have been well worked over. He strikes them out once more and writes: Find one thing in the last day worth telling a total stranger.

* * *

Clearly he's terrified there may be no such thing. I see it in his spine: he'll bother no one with his day's prize, least of all a total stranger.

It's up to me to write his assignment for him. To describe the thing that this day will bring, the one that will turn life stranger than total.

* * *

He gets out at Roosevelt, the Wabash side. He struggles up the stairs against the evening human waterfall. Remnants of the day shift still pour underground, keen on getting home tonight at a reasonable hour. Home before the early autumn rains wash away their subdivision. Home before Nikkei derivatives trigger a Frankfurt DAX panic. Before a rogue state sails a quick-breeding bioweapon through the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Michigan.

At street level, my adjunct is hit by the downtown's stagecraft. The granite gorges, the glass towers with their semaphores of light he's too close to read. To the northeast, the skyline mounts up in stunning ziggurats. His heart pumps at the blazing panorama, as it did when he was a boy gazing at World's Fair futures he would inhabit, any year now. Someone in the crowd clips his back, and he moves on.

Down a canyon to the east, he glimpses a sliver of lakefront: the strip of perfected coast that passes for Chicago. He has stood on the steps of the fabulous nineteenth-century Palace of Taxidermy and gazed north up the sheer city face-the boats in the marina, the emerald park, the epic cliff of skyscrapers curling into the two blues-and felt, despite everything, this place pushing toward something sublime.

Off to his left, dumpsters the size of sperm whales swarm a block-long abyss, each overflowing with last century's smashed masonry. One more angel giant rises from the pit, its girders taking on a sapphire skin. Luxury skybox living: late throes of a South Loop renaissance. Last year's homeless are all hidden away in shelters on the city's perimeter. Chicago hasn't looked better since the fire. The place is after something, a finish line beyond any inhabitant's ability to see, let alone afford.

He wants to fetch his legal pad from his sack and make some notes. Rule one: Get it down before it goes. He'd like to get this down-something about the furnace of renewal, the fall and rise of any given block on the way to this city's obscure goal. But he keeps to the stream of rush-hour foot traffic, afraid of getting arrested for suspicious activity. He pulls up at the entrance of Mesquakie College of Art, a steel-framed limestone temple from back in the age when skyscrapers topped out at a dozen stories.

* * *

No, you're right: those streets don't really run that way. That neighborhood is a little off. The college isn't quite there; it's not that college.

This place is some other Second City. This Chicago is Chicago's in vitro daughter, genetically modified for more flexibility. And these words are not journalism. Only journey.

* * *

His name is Russell Stone, or so he tells the security guard in the Mesquakie lobby. The guard asks to see a college ID; Russell Stone has none. He tries to explain his last-minute hiring. The guard can't find Russell on a printout. He makes several calls, repeating the name with increasing suspicion until Russell Stone is ready to apologize for believing that the job might ever have been his.

At last the guard hangs up. He explains with simple scorn that Stone missed the cutoff date. Against his better judgment, he issues Stone a security badge, shaking his head all the while.

By the time Russell finds his room, his eight students are already encamped around its oval table, deep in a dozen discussions. He grasps at once how badly he has mis-prepped. He fingers his carefully selected textbook through the thick plastic sack-Frederick P. Harmon's Make Your Writing Come Alive. Too late, he sees: the book's a ridiculous blunder. This group will mock it into the hereafter.

I should feel sorry for the man. But what in the name of second chances was he thinking?

In the doorway, he tries a feeble smile; no one looks up. He makes his way, head bobbing, to the gap in the student oval. To hide his shaking hands and call the group to attention, he dumps the sack out on the table. He lifts up Harmon, cocks an eyebrow at the group. The copy in his hands flaps open to a highlighted page:

Convincing characters perform differently for different audiences, in different flavors of crisis. We know them by their changing strategies, often better than they know themselves.

"Everyone find a copy?"

No one says anything.

"Right. Ahhh ..." He flips through his legal pad. "Let's ... see ... Don't tell me!" One or two students chuckle deniably. "Oh, yeah. Roll call. How about a name, biographical tidbit, and life philosophy? I'll start. Russell Stone. By day, mild-mannered editor with a local magazine. Life philosophy ..."

For convenience, I give him mine.

"When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder."

He glances at the woman to his left, all purple and steel. "So who are you, when you're not at home?"

* * *

I wish I could make out Stone's students better. I can see how they disturb him. But I just can't see them in any detail. They're hiding in the sullen, shiny performance of youth.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from GENEROSITYby RICHARD POWERS Copyright © 2009 by Richard Powers. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374161143
• ISBN 13: 9780374161149
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304