The Books: “Galatea 2.2″ (Richard Powers)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers. Unlike Goldbug Variations – which I raved about yesterday – I can’t really remember much about Galatea 2.2 except that the love story really struck a chord with me. It’s poignant, it’s bittersweet … it has that fine beautiful ACHE that I know so well … Powers writes about it perfectly. I remember where I was in my life when I read this book – a strange surreal time – the summer of 96. I was living on 63rd Street with two other people, neither of whom I knew – I was staying in a room that had a big blanket up as a fourth wall … no closets, nothing … it was surreal, to be having such an intense time in my life (like: sobbing myself to sleep intense) and be living with strangers, and to have NO privacy whatsoever. As in: NO DOOR. And for some reason, my memory of Galatea 2.2 is all wrapped up in that summer … And so that’s probably why all I remember of the book is the love story. But I don’t even remember the particulars – just the feeling it brought that Powers was expressing my sense of unrequited lost love perfectly.

The book’s protagonist is named Richard Powers. He has lived abroad for years, and he has also written four novels (Richard Powers himself had written four novels before Galatea 2.2). Powers has come back to the States to be the artist-in-residence at some huge center for advanced study. He somehow gets involved in a project that has as its goal to create a human brain through computer-based networks. I don’t know – synapses firing, computer chips … something … The book really becomes about a meditation on life itself (as so many of Powers’ books do). What is life? Where is it? Can any of us touch it? Powers is instructed to teach this computer all of the great books in the canon – basically filling its microchips with literary information from the Dawn of Time. So that’s how Powers spends his time. Pouring Great Literature into the computer – which gradually becomes smarter and smarter – until it seems to develop something of a consciousness. It wants to know its own name, for example.

Now. What the heck was it about the love story that moved me so much?? I wish I could remember more. Funny what remains in the memory. I am pretty sure that Powers has been living abroad for a reason – to run away from a failed love affair that devastated him – and so being back has brought up all these memories. Of “Her”.

Regardless of the rest of the book surrounding it (and like I said I wish I could remember more) – it has one of my most favorite paragraphs in any book ever:

One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say, “Yes, to everything” once. Once only, before your connections have felt what everything entails.

God, that kills me.

And it killed me back then in that hot miserable summer when I learned about Mitchell and I learned about him getting married. I felt totally bereft. Galatea 2.2 was a comfort to me in those terrifying days.

Flipping through the book now makes me want to read it again.

I wanted to find a resonant excerpt that had to do with the love story Powers describes in the book (is it really Richard Powers in the book? What is fiction? What is autobiography?) … and so here it is.

Strange how a book can act as a time-traveler. A transporter. I read this excerpt and I see my claustrophobic room on 63rd Street, with the blanket for the wall, and I see myself lying in bed, clutching my pains to myself, trying to get through the day.

Must read again.

EXCERPT FROM Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers.

My decade of letters to C. came back, fourth class. No note. But then, I didn’t need one. Any explanation would just be something I would be obliged to send back in turn. I was supposed to follow suit, return hers. I told myself I would, as soon as I found a mailer and could get to the post office.

I laid the bundle in the back of a drawer, alongside the lock whose combination I’d forgotten. I told myself the scrap might be useful all the same. Useful, despite everything, in some other life some other me might someday live.

One day, tripping blindly into it, I finished my last novel. I made my final edit, and knew there was nothing left to change. I could not hang on to the story in good faith even a day longer. I printed the finished draft and packed it in the box my publishers had just used to send me the paperback copies of my previous one.

I sealed the carton with too much packing tape and sat staring at it where it lay on my kitchen counter. I thought of C.’s great-grandmother, who, before she turned twenty, had buried three such shoe boxes of stillborns in the grove above E. I asked myself who in their right mind would want to read an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history.

The calculation came a little late. I biked the box down to the post office and shipped it off to New York, book rate. New York had paid for this casket in advance. They couldn’t afford to be depressed by what I’d done. The long science book had been a surprise success. They were hoping to manufacture a knock-off. I hadn’t given them much of a chance.

The moment the manuscript left my hands, I went slack. I felt as if I’d been in regression analysis for three years. At long last, I had revived the moment of old trauma. But instead of catharsis, I felt nothing. Anesthesia.

What was I supposed to do for the rest of my life? The rest of the afternoon alone seemed unfillable. I went shopping. As always, retail left me with an ice-cream headache.

I figured I might write again, at least once, if the thing could start with that magic first line. But the train – that train I asked the reader to picture – was hung up at departure. It did its southward stint. Then it was gone, leaving me in that waiting room slated on the first timetable.

To figure out where the line was heading, I had to know where it had been. I felt I must have heard it out loud: the opener of a story someone read to me, or one I’d read to someone.

When C. and I lived in that decrepit efficiency in B., we used to read aloud to each other. We slept on the floor, on a reconditioned mattress we’d carried on our heads the five blocks from the Salvation Army. Our blanket was a piling brown wool rug we called the bear.

We huddled under it that first midwinter, when the temperature at night dropped so low the thermometer went useless. After a point, the radiators packed it in. Even flat out, they couldn’t keep pace with the chill blackness seeping through brick and plaster. The only thing that kept us, too, from giving in and going numb were the read-alouds. Then, neither of us wanted to be reader. That meant sticking hands above the covers to hold the book.

It would get so cold our mouths could not form the sounds printed on the page. We lay in bed, trying to warm each other, mumbling numbly by small candlelight – “Silver Blaze,” Benvenuto Cellini – giggling at the absurd temperature, howling in pain at the touch of one another’s frozen toes. We were the other’s entire audience, euphoric, in the still heart of the arctic cold.

That’s how I remembered it, in any case. Maybe we never spoke the notion out loud, but just lying there in the soft, frozen flow of words filled us with expectation. The world could not get this brittle, this severe and huge and silent, without its announcing something.

Somewhere, some shelf must still hold a book with broken black leather binding. A blank journal in which C. and I wrote the titles of all the books we read aloud to each other. If I could find that log, I though, I might search down the first lines of every entry.

Our life in B. was a tender playact. That dismal rental, a South Sea island invented by an eighteenth-century engraver. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts. I wrote expert system routines. For pleasure, we etched a time line of the twentieth century onto the back of a used Teletype roll that we pasted around the top of the room. The Peace of Beijing. Marconi receives the letter “S” from across the Atlantic. Uzbekistan absorbed. Chanel invents Little Black Dress. The limbo becomes national dance craze.

We furnished our first nest with castoffs. Friends alerted us to an overstuffed chair that someone on the far side of the ballpark was, outrageously, throwing out. No three dishes matched. We owned one big-ticket item: a clock radio. Every morning, we woke to the broadcast calls of birds.

When we weren’t reading to each other, we improvised a narrative. The courtyard outside our window was an autograph book of vignettes waiting to be cataloged. The scene below played out an endless penny merriment for our express amusement.

Cops rode by on horseback. Robbers rode by in their perennial hull-scraping Continentals. Parent-free children mined the bushes for dirt clumps to pop in their mouths. A conservatory student blew his sax out the open window, even in December. He threaded his way precariously up a chromatic octave, the cartoon music for seasickness. That’s how I would describe it in the book I still had no idea I would write. The player always, always missed the A-flat on the way up but hit it, by chance, on descending. “Something to do with gravity,” C. joked.

Youngish adults in suits came by selling things. They represented strange and fascinating causes, each more pressing than the last. When the canvassers buzzed our intercom, we sometimes shed some small bills. Or we made the sound of no one home.

A heavy woman on workman’s comp who walked with a cane hobbled by at regular intervals to air out her dog. The dog, Jena, who we decided was named after the battle where Hegel watched Napoleon rout Prussia, was even more fossilized than its owner. Jena would stand thick and motionless, halfway down the sidewalk, contemplating some spiritual prison break, never bothering to so much as tinkle. Its owner, whose name we never learned, waited in the doorway, repeatedly calling the beast with the curt panic of abandonment. The dog would gaze a lifetime at the horizon, then turn back in desolation.

I relayed these anecdotes to C., who lay in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to be blind and paralyzed, at the mercy of my accounts. I elaborated events for her, embroidering until the improbability of the whole human fabric made her smile. When she smiled, it always stunned me that I’d discovered her before anyone else had.

Even while we playacted it, I recognized that fantasy. It came from a collection of ghost stories that a famous editor had assembled before we were young.

I told C., from memory, the one about two men lying in the critical ward. The one, a heart patient, has the window bed. He spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community outside to amuse his wardmate. He names all the characters: Mr. Rich. The Messenger Boy. The Lady with the Legs. He weaves this endless, dense novel for the quadriplegic in the next bed, who cannot see through the window from wher ehe lies.

Then one night the window narrator has a heart attack. He convulses. He grapples for his medicine on the nightstand between the beds. The paralyzed man, seizing his chance at last to see this infinite world for himself, summons from nowhere one superhuman lunge and dashes the medicine to the floor.

When they move him to the emptied window bed the next day, all he can see is a brick wall.

“That’s a great story,” C. told me. In the icy dark, I felt her excitement. The world lay all in front of us. “I love that one. I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you for it.”