How Imagination Shapes Two Destinies

Richard Powers’ seventh novel is the story of two empty rooms, one in Seattle, one in Beirut. Each is as small as a walk-in closet and as vast as the universe. The human imagination alone can fill them--but at what cost?

In the late 1980s, a New York artist, Adie Klarpol, is recruited by an old college friend, Steve Spiegel, to work in “the Cavern,” a pioneering virtual-reality lab. Adie is willing to move west because she has already fled the “commercialism” of avant-garde painting for the honest “commerce” of illustration. Why not be paid better for it?

“You have no idea how horrible it is,” she tells Steve. “To give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it’s not about beauty at all. It’s about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.” Art is just another commodity.

Adie gradually recovers her idealism in the company of the Cavern’s staff of brilliant eccentrics, and in the sheer pleasure of playing with ever-higher technology. The little white room, whose walls, floor and ceiling are all screens, can become anything she wants--a childlike “Crayon World,” a jungle, Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, a life-size, fully detailed Byzantine cathedral.

Meanwhile, Taimur Martin, an Iowan whose mother was Iranian, takes a job teaching English in Lebanon’s war-torn capital. His life in America has been dull, and he feels invulnerable. However, a joke he makes in class leads somebody to think he’s a CIA agent. Islamic terrorists kidnap him, chain him to a radiator in the second little room, feed him slop, deny him exercise or reading material, sometimes beat him.

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Powers has used double plots before, playing off each other like melodic lines in the Bach counterpoint he celebrated in “The Gold Bug Variations.” In “Plowing the Dark,” though, the connections are more abstract. Workers in the Cavern lose touch with the outside world, with their lives, with the motives of the corporation that hired them. Imagination seduces them, even as it proves to be Taimur’s salvation in captivity.

Powers exploits this contrast with his trademark intellectual richness. Better than any other current American novelist, he bridges what C.P. Snow called “the two cultures,” literary and scientific. His prose makes technology sing and music compute.

But because the stories of the Cavern and the kidnapping are static--necessarily so--and because they intersect, in a literal way, at only one point--a hallucinatory moment when Adie’s virtual reality and Taimur’s imagination are the same place--this novel lacks some of the emotional punch that previously accompanied the dazzle.

It’s as if we’re hearing a single chord rather than a whole fugue. This time, for the first time, Powers doesn’t quite break our hearts.

Too many of the best scenes in “Plowing the Dark” are flashbacks--Taimur’s neurotic, lacerating relationship with his ex-lover, Gwen; bohemian life in the University of Wisconsin commune where Adie and Steve first met and where their mutual friend, composer Ted Zimmerman, contracted muscular sclerosis.

Nor is Adie’s second disillusionment quite convincing. Even as she rejoices in the freeing of Eastern Europe and in the vistas of human potential that her work opens up, could she really forget that virtual reality has defense applications, too--that it began, in fact, with Air Force flight simulators? When the Gulf War breaks out, smart bombs thread down chimneys and the retreating Iraqi army is “turned into a 100-mile-long human ash,” Adie is shattered. “The world machine had used her.” Art is just another weapon.

Maybe so. But has it ever been otherwise? And does this keep it from being art? Powers’ own work would argue: No.