This afternoon, after running a bank errand, I stopped into Powell’s Books on Hawthorne to check for a cheap used paperback copy of The Time of Our Singing, thinking that perhaps I could finish it if I had a copy that was easier to tote around.
(Yes, I’m aware of the peculiarity of linking to a Powell’s store while simultaneously linking to an Amazon listing for the actual book.)
While indeed locating such a copy, I noticed one of the staff recommendation cards planted beneath the Richard Powers books, specifically in reference to The Gold Bug Variations.
“Up there with Gravity’s Rainbow as far as ambition,” it read in part. “You can handle this? I don’t believe you.”
Now, it’s true that Gold Bug appears to be Powers’ longest book, coming in at 639 pages, at least in my standard trade paperback edition (Singing comes in at 631). But I’m not at all convinced that its Powers’ most challenging novel.
I’ve established previously that I find Operation Wandering Soul to be his most emotionally difficult book. But while Gold Bug may be densly rich, it carries the reader so well that it’s hardly a Pynchon-like endeavor.
(Which is not meant somehow to be a slight against Powers as author or Gold Bug as book.)
It would probably require a re-read of all of his novels to offer a firm suggestion as to which is the most challenging, but my suspicion is that I’d come down on the side of his first novel — Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance as potentially being his most challenging work.
Personally, I’ve only been through that one once, but I distinctly recall being confounded most of the way, because the three threads of the story didn’t appear to match up properly. As it turned out, there was a reason for that, but it didn’t become clear to me until almost at book’s end.
So at memory’s first glance, that’s the one I’d peg as being, in many ways at least, his most challenging book, which arguably would make it more ambitious. Although, it occurs to me now in this late moment, I suppose it would depend on how we’re defining “ambition” in this context.