The Books: “The Goldbug Variations” (Richard Powers)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

First off, a link (because basically I don’t know where to start). And an excerpt from that link:

There’s something — something I can’t quite articulate — being said about art here — painting (which figures in the book), literature (by extrapolation), but especially music. It’s beyond science, beyond knowing, yet it’s key to one’s ability to know anything else. Indeed, art and love, those inarticulate things, the only things to really mean anything.

That post, in its entire, makes me cry. It is her first response to the book – a book I read years ago, when it first came out … and was blown AWAY by. It’s not one of those books I would tell just anyone to read – it’s too difficult, too huge, too … brain-taxing – but I did give it to Ted to read – I just knew … He HAD to read it. So Ted and I are now Goldbug Variations fanatics. To me, the book works on every level it needs to work – and not only does it work, but it upends itself, mirrors itself, goes back, forwards, and then – breathtakingly – sometimes stands still. It is an exhilarating ride. And how do you talk about a book that encompasses … so much? I tapped into it on such a profound psychological and also emotional level that it’s one of the few times, after reading a book, when I can say I felt actually changed. The thing about the language of the book … it is daunting. It is. I find that fun. That’s just me. It’s also intellectually rigorous – it’s a quest … that takes our characters far and wide, through all kinds of disciplines … But also, for me, the book is a piercing love story – and having read Richard Powers’ novel Galatea 2.2, which is even more so just about the love story – I can say that he is a master at writing about unrequited love. There was just something about the tone of his writing that clicked me right into that line of the music. And so even during the long sections about Mendel or Bach or DNA …. I still was hearing that chord. I think it’s an essential chord to understanding Powers’ work. Let’s go back to that link from Magnificent Octopus again. I just love her responses … and the quotes she pulls. It really reflects my own response to the book … which knocked me on my ass. Not just because it’s about so much … but because of what it had to say about love. I think some people might miss that about the book, or they look at it – and they see the mathematical equations and lines of music running through the text – and might think it’s too intellectual, or too “hard”, whatever. But in the end: it’s all about LOVE. And it just KILLED me.

In the present day, we meet Janet O’Deigh, a librarian in a big New York Public Library branch. Well, the book opens with her receiving a postcard from a guy named Todd, informing her that their “friend” had died. The book then goes back in time – to Jan’s first meeting with their “friend” – in the library where she works. Their friend is an old hermit named Stuart Ressler, a dignified kind of ratty old chap … who works as a data entry processor in a midnight shift with Todd. Todd (who doesn’t know Jan yet) becomes really interested in Ressler – who is this guy? What is his story? He plays classical music in the break room, and goes off into a trance … Todd decidees to do a little research and shows up at the library, which is how HE meets Jan. He is looking to find out who this Stuart Ressler guy is. (I’m just talking about the plot now, not all the swirling subtext). Eventually, they discover that Stuart Ressler was, in 1957, part of a team of scientists hired to try to crack the DNA code. There were teams all over the country, and Ressler, a young man at the time, was one of them. But why did he drop out? Why wasn’t he scientist anymore? Why does he work the midnight shift in data entry? The book sweeps us back and forth – from multiple times in the present: Jan, by herself, after Todd has somehow left (we don’t know why …) – and she sets herself the task of researching everything she can that will help her understand Dr. Ressler – so she’s studying biology, chemistry, microbiology – oh yeah, and also music. Specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations as played by Glenn Gould in a famous recording. We also see, a bit further back, Todd and Jan befriending the elderly Stuart Ressler … and beginning to get to know his story. The book also takes us back, far back, into 1957 … with a young Stuart Ressler traveling to a college campus in the midwest, to join a team of code-crackers. It’s two books, running along side by side.

The book has a very intricate design: it is a double helix, first of all – and second of all – it mirrors all of the movements of Bach’s famous piece of music. I would need to understand far more about the music (and DNA, I suppose) to pick up on the multiple strands woven through here. Suffice it to say … in The Goldberg Variations, Bach starts with a simple theme, easily heard … which then morphs and submerges itself – over the variations – although the theme is always here – it just is inverted, or down a third, or whatever – you have to know where to look for it … but the thing is: It’s there. So The Goldbug Variations (yes, Poe’s famous story is an important plot-point) follows the theme of “The Goldberg Variations” – as well as the structure of DNA. It takes my breath away.

Richard Powers is a phenom, and his books are not always comprehensible. There have been a couple I had to put down. But this one and Galatea 2.2 rocked me to my core. He writes about love – the experience of love – not exactly the fulfillment of it – but what it feels like to love – like no other author.

The Goldbug Variations is a book that is about codes … and it is also a code in and of itself.

It’s a breathtaking work of literature. I can’t say enough about it.

Here’s an excerpt. Jan’s research into DNA and enzymes and all that – is a way to know and understand Stuart Ressler better. Who was this man, and what did he see back in 1957 that made him walk away? What is left undone?

How can cells and molecules and enzymes put together end up in the miracle of a human being? How does that happen?? Also: how can we, who are made up of those elements, how can we investigate ourselves? Stuart Ressler walked away from that question. He couldn’t take it.

And let’s not forget – that the book is also a double love story. And so often we talk about love in metaphors. It’s difficult to describe its essence. And so often scientists talk in metaphors – making things either visual or comprehensible – to us, the layman audience, or even to themselves. Dr. Ressler wants to get past metaphor in his understanding of DNA and genetic inheritance. It is his only ambition in life. And Jan and Todd, trying to understand Dr. Ressler, also want to get past metaphor. They want to understand him, his essence … can they name it? And by naming something, do you take away its essence?

EXCERPT FROM Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

Landscape with Conflagration

I’ve reached a sticking point in my homework, the background reading that must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to comprehension: I remember, flexing my intellect again this season, that given time, I have the capacity to tackle anything, however formidable. And I have more than enough time – time spreading from sunny sahara mornings alone over onion bagels and oranges to arctic nights, postponing sleep as long as possible, armed with only thick books and a headboard lamp. I’ve hit a barrier not to comprehension but credulity. How can an assortment of invisible threads inside one germ cell record and pass along the construction plans of the whole organism, let alone the cell housing the threads themselves? I’ve grasped the common metaphor: the blueprint gene somehow encodes a syntactic message, an entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract gene to physical chromosome. But it remains analogy, lost in intermediary words.

The task Dr. Ressler set himself was merely – and only he could have thought “merely” – to capture the enigma machine that tweaks this chromosomal message into readability. Did he believe that nothing was lost in translation as signals percolated up from molecules in the thread into him, that brain, those limbs, that hurt, alert face? Searching for his own lexicon required faith that the chemical semaphore could serve as its own rosetta, faith that biology too could be revealed through its particulars. Faith that demonstration could replace faith.

It grows like a crystal, this odd synthesis of evolution, chemistry, and faith, spreads in all directions at once, regular but aperiodic. By Ressler’s birth, enzymes – catalysts driving the chemical reactions of metabolism – were identified as proteins. The structure of proteins – responsible for everything from the taste of sole to the toughness of a toenail – strikes me as ridiculously simple: linear, crumpled necklaces of organic pearls called amino acids. What’s more, the protein necklaces directing all cell processes consist of series of only twenty different amino acid beads.

It seems impossible: twenty can’t be sufficient word-hoard to engineer the tens of thousands of complex chemical reactions required to make a thing live. But lying in bed under my arctic nightlight, carrying out the simple arithmetic, I see how the abject simplicity of protein produces more potential than mind can penetrate. A necklace of only two beads, each one in twenty colors, can assume any of four hundred different combinations. A third bead increases this twenty times – eight thousand possible necklaces. I learn that the average protein necklace floating in the body weighs in at hundreds of beads. At that length, the possible string combinations exceed the printed sentences in man-made creation. Room to grow, in other words.

The protein bead string folds up, forms secondary structures determined by its amino acid sequence. The shape of these fantastic landscapes, fuzz-motes as convoluted as the string is simple, gives them their specific, chemical power. Their jungle of surface protrusions provides – like so many dough forms – niches for other chemicals to assemble and react.

But if these cookie cutters – in countless possible fantastically complex shapes – build the body, what builds the builders? The answer appalls me. The formula for the builder molecules as well as its implementation are contained in another long, linear molecule. This time the beads come in only four colors. It says something about my progress in scientific faith that I accept that calculation showing that the possible combinations in one such foursquare informational molecule exceed the total number of atoms in the universe.

But I hang up on the idea of such a linear molecule encoding a breathing, hoping, straining, failing, aging, dying scientist. I find as I read that I’m in good company. If I still ran the Quote Board, I’d use tomorrow that gem of Einstein’s when meeting Morgan and hearing of his project to mechanize biology:

No, the trick won’t work … How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

But I no longer run the Quote Board. I run nothing now except the Jan O’Deigh Continuing Education Project. And for that, I have only more history. When counting aminos fails to put me to sleep, I charm insomnia by reading Beadle and Tatum’s 1940 work on the bread mold Neurospora. Only seventeen years old when Ressler got his brainstorm, it must have read like a classic to a student raised on it. While the world once more indulged its favorite occupation, Beadle and Tatum dosed mold with X-rays to induce mutations. Raising thousands of test-tube strains, they produced mutants that could no longer manufacture required nutrients. Mutated chromosomes failed to produce necessary enzymes.

With an excitement that penetrates even the sober journal account, they crossed a mutant that could no longer make enzyme E with its normal counterpart. Half the offspring had the mutation and half did not. Enzyme production precisely mirrored Mendelian inheritance. One gene, one enzyme, Each time I read the conclusion, I hear his perverse question: “What could be simpler?”

A unique gene, coding for a unique enzyme: Cyfer inherited as dogma what actually arose only through recent, bitter debate. The limited informational content of DNA – the four bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – did not seem adequate to build the fantastically varied amino acid necklaces. For some time, the size of DNA was underestimated, and even after the enormous molecular weight was correctly determined, many scientists believed that the four bases followed one another in repeating order. Redundant series carry no more information than a news program repeating, “Earlier today, earlier today …”

DNA was long rejected as the chromosomal message carrier. Some researchers believed that proteins themselves were the master blueprint, even though every protein would require others to build it. Avery blazed the trail out of confusion. His 1944 paper showed that the substance transforming one bacterial strain to another was not protein but DNA. Inheritance was rapidly being reduced from metaphor to physical construct. DNA was a plan that somehow threaded raw amino acid beads into proteins. These protein chains in turn catalyzed all biological process. Cyfer’s question – the coding problem – was how a long string of four types of things stood for thousands of shorter, twenty-thing strings.

Before the problem could even be posed, scientists had first to determine a structure for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure fell the year Ressler attained legal adulthood, one of the most celebrated solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the amount of adenine equal that of thymine, guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C + T. DNA presented too many structural possibilities to be cracked by standard organic analysis. By starting with the constraints in Franklin’s and Wilkins’s data, Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double helix, where complementary base pairs – G pairing always with C, A always with T – form the spiral rungs.

Temperament, coded in long strings of base pairs, plays a big part in any interpretation of data. The full ramifications of the model were not quickly grasped. It followed neatly that chromosomes were just supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel’s genes were simply sections of chromosome, a length of spiral staircase – say ten thousand base-pair rungs spelling out auburn hair. But using four letters to convey the content of all living things seemed like transmitting every Who’s Who of this century in staticky dots and dashes across a copper filament.

How was the message read? How to determine the language of the cipher? Understand that question and I’ve understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact the work of the structurists, trained his temperament on the smallest end of the genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The task given him was to determine how twin-helical sequences of four bases

…A-C-C-G-T-G-T-G-A-A-C-G-G…
…T-G-G-C-A-C-A-C-T-T-G-C-C…

strung amino acids into enfolded protein:

…threonine-valine-tryptophan …

Dr. Ressler’s question was not primarily cytological or chemical or even genetic, although it was all these. Heredity’s big hookup lay in information, pure form. It floated agonizingly close in the air, an all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall. Yet prestige played no more than ironically in Ressler’s mind. His was a drive deeper than recognition, a need to cross that hierarchical border, that edge, that isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach it on pattern alone, reach down and take into his hands the first word, name it, that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming need itself – first love, forgiveness, frailty.