THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS by Richard Powers
Morrow; 639 pages; $25
Some may find this novel's title, with its punning allusions to Bach's Goldberg Variations and Poe's short story The Gold Bug, a little too cute, and they are probably right. On the other hand, The Gold Bug Variations passes the truth-in-advertising test: the label accurately reflects the additives Bach and Poe to the contents inside and warns away consumers who prefer their fiction plain.
The rest are in for a read of dazzling, sometimes intimidating complexity, which includes, among many, many other things, two love stories, separated by a quarter-century but analogous in a number of tantalizing ways; a detective story, pieced together from random clues, tracing the disappearance of a brilliant young scientist from a quest that seemed to promise him a Nobel Prize; a sprinkling of charts, tables and graphs; thumbnail histories of Western music and painting and of newer subjects like information theory and computer programming; a white-knuckle account of the race to find the meaning of life within a molecule; and the constant hum of intellectual enchantment.
This sinuous story begins near its conclusion, in June 1985. Jan O'Deigh, an employee at a Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library, receives a note from her former lover Franklin Todd: Stuart Ressler is dead. Grieving, Jan remembers the day some three years earlier when Todd first appeared at her desk and requested information about Ressler. "What was the man's line of work?" she had asked. "Don't know for sure," came the reply. "Something hard. Something objective, I mean." And why did he want to know about Ressler? "I work with him."
All true, Jan discovers. Using her formidable research skills, she digs up references to Ressler in 1958, including a small photograph in LIFE with the caption "Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life." And then she is taken to meet Ressler himself, at a nearby renovated warehouse where he and Todd, an art-history graduate student stalled on his dissertation, work the night shift for a computer billing outfit.
Jan, approaching 30, falls in love with Todd, four years her junior, and, in a different way, with Dr. Ressler, who is entering his 50s and who "came as close as anyone I've ever met to demonstrate that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete." With Todd now vanished and Ressler gone, she impulsively quits her job to record the months the three of them spent together -- talking all night while the computers whirred, enjoying a snowbound weekend in New Hampshire -- and to find out what happened to Stuart Ressler and why.