You must remember bliss

Generosity By Richard Powers 296pp, Atlantic, $32.95

Generosity By Richard Powers 296pp, Atlantic, $32.95

IN 1898, poet William Wordsworth wrote these lines:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.

A little more than two centuries later, Richard Powers, an American novelist whose body of work can be seen as a thrilling rejoinder to the tradition of anti-scientism that has been a part of Western culture since Wordsworth helped found the romantic era, has produced a fiction that wonders whether the poet wasn't on to something.

It is not that Powers's 10th novel, Generosity, reveals a mind gone to war with science; its exploration of genomics, a field in which the basic structures of life are broken down, mapped, then potentially screened, reshaped or augmented, is filtered through the novelist's imagination with the same rapt attention and intellectual clarity he brought to aberrant psychological states in The Echo Maker or artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2.

But, for the protagonists of this new work, science has exceeded the capacity of humans to cope with its revolutionary demands. Generosity's narrative, which concerns an extraordinary young woman who is unfailingly happy all the time, is actually very sad: the genetic information her body holds is so precious we know the world will destroy her to get it. In this old-school humanist fable, the goose is sliced open for her golden eggs.

Powers's fictional stand-in here is Russell Stone, a failed writer, Chicago-based, who has reluctantly taken on a semester's work as an adjunct tutor at an art college. He has the quaint task of teaching creative writing to a younger generation in thrall to the visual.

Enter Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old Algerian immigrant whose presence in the class he finds electrifying. Her delight in the world is so even and so sustained that the constitutionally melancholy Stone suspects her of self-medication. When he finds out what Thassa has survived to make it to the US, Stone decides she is simply cracked.

Yet, as the course progresses and Thassa shares with her teacher and classmates tales of her country's long history of colonial subjugation and its more recent political violence, the death of both her parents and her subsequent flight to the West, no medical or psychological explanation seems adequate. Ten years of organised bloodbath have reduced a country to a walking corpse, Stone is stunned to discover. And Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.

Stone worries at the enigma of Thassa's incorrigible happiness like a tongue at a missing tooth. He finally makes contact with Candace Weld, a counsellor attached to the college, and shares his student's story. While these two kind, clever and slightly battered individuals become something like foster parents to Thassa during the coming months, their own growing intimacy distracts them from the slow leak of Thassa's fame into the public sphere.

Generosity's other half introduces those who threaten this idyll. Thomas Kurton is a brilliant genomicist whose biotech company has potentially isolated the genes that control happiness. When news of the young Algerian woman reaches him via the internet, he determines that a test of her genetic make-up could prove once and for all that his research is correct.

By making Thassa's happiness a subject for scientific inquiry, however, Kurton - a blind believer in the unquestionable good of genetic engineering - threatens to unweave the rainbow of human emotion. Some of the strongest passages in the novel face head-on the prospect of a world, by no means far away, in which humans are manufactured from scratch.

Stone, that obsolete humanist, appreciates the implications of Kurton's work for all of us. And his resulting pessimism, not just about Thassa's wellbeing but humanity's ability to use science and technology rather than being used by it, stains the whole work.

Stone's despair may also explain why Generosity, while still a more dazzling novel of ideas than 99 per cent of current fiction, is weaker than others by the same author. It doesn't help that Stone is a fictional Eeyore who is slightly too effective in talking down literatures merits in an age of instantaneous global communication, nor that Kurton's science intends to take the human out of humanism, once and for all.

The deeper malaise, though, seems to lie in the narrator's shaken faith in humanity. It is not only genetic engineering that comes to mind when Stone wonders at the capacity of the human race to survive its own ingenuity. Just as Albert Camus's novel The Plague ends with a vision of dormant bacilli in the homes of everyday Algerians, waiting to flare up again, Powers's novel suggests a world where reason is on the verge of breaking down. In an era when science is privatised or demonised, when the older arts are despised or ignored, the culture's power to preserve rationality, to offer enlightenment or share experience, is degraded.

So it is to Powers's great credit that he finds some leeway for hope and some reason for writing. Stone at one point quizzes Thassa about her plans. She speaks of a desire to make documentaries. He wonders whether she can make a living in such a job and she laughs, explaining that, since we should all by rights be clouds of frozen dust, "livings are easy".

Here is the secret of Thassa's joy and that of Powers, too: awe at the universe that exists quite apart from any adaptive trait an evolutionary psychologist may explain away. Its fullest expression, given in an interview by the author a few years ago, would make Wordsworth proud:

Art is a way of saying what it means to be alive, and the most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it. For every way that there is of being here, there are an infinity of ways of not being here. Historical accident snuffs out whole universes with every clock tick. Statistics declare us ridiculous. Thermodynamics prohibits us. Life, by any reasonable measure, is impossible, and my life - this, here, now - infinitely more so. Art is a way of saying, in the face of all that impossibility, just how worth celebrating it is to be able to say anything at all.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.