Where to start with Richard Powers: a guide to his best fiction

Richard Powers’ last four novels – from 2014’s Orfeo to 2024’s Playground – were all either longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Four nominations in one decade may be some kind of record for Booker ubiquity, making Powers the American author with the most nods. It is the kind of statistic that would appeal to the data-obsessed men and women who populate his fiction.  

From his 1985 debut, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, through to his most recent work, Powers has shown that he is at home in both of what C.P. Snow called ‘the two cultures’ – science and the humanities. Powers, who worked as a computer programmer before devoting himself to writing, has made it the mission of his polyphonic fictions, which specialise in parallel narratives across time and continents, to combine those two cultures in novels about war, music, history, computing and, perhaps most pertinently for our current moment, artificial intelligence. For the novelist’s imagination, he shows, there is one culture.   

I started reading Powers in the early 2000s after coming across an interview in which David Foster Wallace sited Powers and George Saunders, who had recently published his second collection of stories, as two contemporaries he particularly admired. Even after 20-odd years of reading Powers, I don’t always understand what his characters are talking about – at least not initially, when they start having conversations about, say, DNA (The Gold Bug Variations), chemicals that cause cancer (Gain) or oceanography (Playground).  

I was terrible at science at school and, if anything, turned to fiction to escape such bloodless drudgery. But Powers makes these topics essential, writing about them in a contemporary idiom that illuminates their immediacy, blending the voice of the polymath and ironic Gen Xer. These are not merely the intellectual pyrotechnics that were common among some members of his generation of American novelists (although Powers does that with seductive brio, too), for whom Thomas Pynchon was a formative influence. In Powers’ books, clarity and emotional power always break through the web of complicated ideas.  

The force in Powers’ fiction is the unavoidable awareness that human beings’ grandest endeavours and follies all come down to our futile drive to escape death. Forty years into his career, what Powers once wrote of Don DeLillo’s White Noise is true of his own work: ‘[It] remains deeply disconcerting, prophetic, hilarious, volatile, enigmatic and altogether resistant to containment or antidote.’  

The one that tackles America, race and music  

As we will see again in his subsequent novels, Powers is fascinated by genius. In The Time of Our Singing, he uses the story of two astonishingly talented singers, born to a white Jewish father and African American mother, who grew up in the era of civil rights. Powers has never been afraid to write Black characters. He succeeds, where other white writers may fail, because the voices in his fiction are palpably the result of listening to individuals from the diverse communities of Chicago and elsewhere. This novel was published in 2002, a moment when American writers of Powers’ generation, such as Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and others, were producing sweeping novels that aimed to distil the legacies of the American 20th century and pose questions about what kind of society the US might become in the 21st.  

The one that asks who we are 

Published in 2006, The Echo Maker demonstrated that Powers was increasingly interested in using fiction to make scientific theories about human identity accessible to readers. It’s the story of a man who suffers brain damage after a road accident in Nebraska. While he is in a coma, a mysterious note appears at his bedside: ‘I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.’ As he begins his recovery, he decides his sister is an impostor. He is suffering from Capgras syndrome, which causes a disconnection between emotional memory and facts, and his case attracts the interest of a neurologist who brings his own fraught story to the novel. Are we who we think we are? Is there such a thing as an essential self? Powers explores these fundamental questions at the same time as his characters try to unravel the mysteries of their own experiences. 

The one to read if you want a general introduction 

How do you follow a masterpiece? Bewilderment (2021), Powers’ first novel after The Overstory was, like its predecessor, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This time, Powers uses a smaller canvas, but the effects are arguably just as vast, as he turns to dystopia for this first Trump presidency-era tale of Theo, a widowed astrobiologist, and his neuro-divergent son, Robin. Both are grieving for Robin’s late mother, who died in a car crash, and distressed at the ecocide that is unfolding around them. Robin suffers at school for his idealism and stages political protests, as Theo tries to soothe him with fantastical stories that enthral the reader, too. One of Powers’ shorter novels, it distils some of his major themes.   

The one that shows him at the peak of his powers 

Our planet should be named ‘Ocean’, not Earth, as the majority of it is covered in water, observes a character in Playground, Powers’ fourteenth and most recent novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Here, Powers revisits the subject of artificial intelligence and shows that even tech pioneers with good intentions can lose control of their inventions as they run amok. But his true subject here is the wonder of oceans that are being devastated by mankind. As ever, he makes disparate narratives intersect to tell the story of estranged school friends, a diver with exceptional lung capacity, and the inhabitants of a Polynesian island who face an impossible choice when a billionaire makes them an offer. With its paeans to the sea’s ‘swirling colours’, an urgent message about the natural environment, and its twist at the end, Playground shows that, four decades into his career, Powers’ fiction remains exhilarating.