Orfeo

Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home DIY microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear’s ability to hear—has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for the alarm surrounding his activities to blow over. His days in hiding provoke memories of a turbulent century of musical turf wars and cause Els to reflect on a life spent chasing after transcendent sounds to the bewilderment of an indifferent public.

As the national hysteria for safety erupts again in the face of this latest threat, Els—the “Bioterrorist Bach”—feeling the noose around him tighten, embarks on a cross-country trip to visit the people in his past who have most shaped his failed musical journey. Through the help of these people—his ex-wife, his daughter and his long-time artistic collaborator—Els comes up with a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into one last, resonant artwork that might reach an audience beyond his wildest dreams.

Inspired by Steve Kurtz, the bio-artist wrongly arrested for terrorism by the FBI, Orfeo probes the boundary between stifling safety and reckless, releasing danger. It explores the varieties of human hunger, in particular the desire to hear more and to make meaning where there is none. Finally, the book is a meditation on that most endangered and priceless of human resources: attention.

From BooklistStarred Review Retired composer Peter Els has an unusual hobby, do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Is his work dangerous? We’re not sure, but when hazmat-suited government agents descend on his home, he flees, becoming perhaps the world’s least likely suspected terrorist, the “biohacker Bach.” On his prolonged cross-country journey, we learn Els’ life story in flashback: how he fell in love with music and with a woman, went to school at the height of the avant garde, and began a lifelong struggle between the urge to invent and the need to please. World events, from JFK’s assassination to 9/11 to H5N1, provide a kind of tragic meter. Els’ leap from music to genetics seems forced at first, but Powers (a National Book Award winner for The Echo Maker, 2006) plays the long game, sure-handedly building a rich metaphor in which composition is an analog for other kinds of human invention, with all the beauty and terror that implies. Like his protagonist, he makes art that challenges rather than reassures his audience. Powers has a way of rendering the world that makes it seem familiar and alien, friendly and frightening. He is sometimes criticized as too cerebral, but when the story’s strands knit fully together in the final act, the effect is heartbreaking and beautiful. --Keir Graff

Review“Powers deftly dramatizes the obsession that has defined Els’s life: ‘How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?'” (The New Yorker)

“Powers is prodigiously talented, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life.” (Jim Holt - The New York Times Book Review)

“Powers’s talent for translating avant-garde music into engrossing vignettes on the page is inexhaustible. Els’s obsession with avant-garde, which isolates him from everyone he loves, becomes the very thing that aligns him with the reader.” (Publishers Weekly, Starred review)

“The earmarks of the renowned novelist’s work are here… but rarely have his novels been so tightly focused and emotionally compelling.” (Kirkus, Starred review)

“Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter.” (Heller McAlpin - NPR)

“Powers proves, once again, that he's a master of the novel with Orfeo, an engrossing and expansive read that is just as much a profile of a creative, obsessive man as it is an escape narrative.” (Elizabeth Sile - Esquire)

“Orfeo is that rare novel truly deserving of the label ‘lyrical'…. Richard Powers offers a profound story whose delights are many and lasting.” (Harvey Freedenberg - Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“Orfeo reveals how a life, and the narrative of a life, accumulates, impossibly, infinitely, from every direction…. In this retelling of the Orpheus myth Powers also manages enchantment.” (Scott Korb - Slate)

“Orfeo… establishes beyond any doubt that the novel is very much alive.” (Troy Jollimore - Chicago Tribune)

“Magnificent and moving.” (David Ulin - The Los Angeles Times)

“Extraordinary…[Powers's] evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page.” (Dan Cryer - Newsday)

“Of novelists in Powers's generation with whom he is often compared—Franzen, Vollmann, Wallace—none equals Powers's combination of consistent production, intellectual range, formal ingenuity, and emotional effect.” (Tom LeClair - The Christian Science Monitor)

“For sheer bravado in constructing sentences, few authors of contemporary fiction can surpass Powers…One of his finest yet.” (Ted Gioia - The San Francisco Chronicle)

“Powers’ writing is complex and heady without being head-achy, and his synesthetic descriptions of finding melodies in the mundane are full of their own kind of music.” (Keith Staskiewicz - Entertainment Weekly)

“An extraordinary feat… makes the inaccessible comprehensible.” (Andrew Leonard - Salon)

“Biology and music, past and present, come together in a clever, explosive resolution.” (Adam Kirsch - Boston Globe)

“While it starts off with a thriller plotline—falsely accused bioterrorist on the run—Richard Powers's Orfeo constantly shifts gears.” (Ron Hogan - The Daily Beast)