I’m just over halfway through just finished this brick, and so much has happened that I feel justified in taking some time to reflect. Richard Powers’ work resonates with me on so many levels, and I particularly admire his devotion to concept. In The Gold Bug Variations, he’s turned his focus on the information encoded in DNA, exploring the hodgepodge of mechanics, mystery, and miracle that is genetic heredity. How do four letters — A, C, G, T — account for all life on earth? How does this non-conscious string of nucleotides encode the infrastructure of its own replication? And how, at the level of the conscious organism, does that same encoded self-replication translate to desire, romance, and sexual longing? In true Powers fashion everything — including his characters, the structure of the novel, and even the punning style of his prose — is designed to develop these explorations further.

At the structural level, GBV is comprised of two interlocking complementary narratives: in the mid-fifties, a geneticist working in Illinois seeks to crack the genetic code and falls in love with a married coworker. Thirty years later that scientist dies, and a reference librarian at a public library in Brooklyn Heights quits her job so that she can better understand him, his life’s work, and the way that their friendship (and the affair she had with his present-day coworker) uprooted her marriage and rekindled her excitement for living. I can’t say much more because the two time-displaced couples have only just gotten together, though I know it will not end happily for either.

Regardless, Powers has thus far done an incredible job of describing and depicting what it’s like to fall in love, and pairing both love stories with themes of seasonality and cycle has added a naturalism and nostalgia that I enjoy. The characters have gone through a lot, but the emotionally fraught decisions, recollections, couplings, and dissolutions are all handled with such nuance and understatement that I am regularly heartbroken by the beauty of moments that would wither in the hands of a lesser artist. I also love the strong musical through line of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which both drive the plot forward and even lend the novel its structure.

Richard Powers’ books are so intelligent, emotionally resonant, and informative. They unify huge scientific and cultural trends with historical marginalia and individual experience in a way that is so humbling and makes you marvel at the world in a way you didn’t see before opening the pages. This novel is utterly sublime.