Orfeo by Richard Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I feel ungenerous for not liking this novel more, but I struggled to wade through all the metaphors and find a human heart at the center of the story. Peter Els, the composer and suspected bioterrorist at the center of this story, is sympathetic in his old age, but reads as befuddled and consistently out of step with his present moment, even as a young man. Which is no crime. Plenty of us feel disconnected from the modern age—it’s often how art gets made. But in Els’ case, I wanted to see him embrace iconoclasm fully, or abandon his composing dreams and launch into another career. Instead he seems to play it safely down the middle, shucking off relationships and obligations along the way, and then playing hurt when he realizes he’s alone. The character study felt like a prop to get him to a point where DHS is sending a pack of storm troopers to his suburban home-cum-bioweapons lab. Sure, Orfeo highlights our hair-trigger, overkill response to fear in the modern age, but I couldn’t buy it.
My hat’s off, though, to Powers for writing as well as he does about musical compositions and performances. I did learn a bit—especially about the revolutionary ways of listening introduced by Cage and his contemporaries. I think these passages (with young Els, Maddy, and Richard all excited and scheming) were my favorite.