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Gen Voor Geluk: Een Revisie (2009)

by Richard Powers(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

9025432085 (ISBN13: 9789025432089)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

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review 1: Human Nature Many reviewers are taken with the topicality of Power's books - his interest in science and music, his command of detail, his obvious research and intellect, his clever writing. My belief is that Powers is a master of trying to unravel human nature and that his novels are his canvas for this.The story of Generosity is this - a nerdy writer takes a college class in creative non-fiction and meets two unusual women. His student, an Algerian refugee seems afflicted by permanent happiness despite her terrible personal story. He brings this up with a student psychology counsellor, Candace, and the pair decide to explore whether she is 'suffering' from a medical condition. They turn to a famous Ventnor type to test her and the ensuing action turns her life upside dow... moren and miserable.In all this, Powers demonstrates his prowess at exploring what is natural in human beings. The writer stands for the arts and human nature, Candace for reason and science - and they fall in love. It is obvious role reversal. Thomas Kurton (the Ventnor character) is pure masculine science - let's improve on mother nature - and the female science reporter who breaks the story is conflicted and changes sides from science to nature in the course of the plot. None of this feels contrived.At the heart of the drama is the lovely Thassa - the ultimate woman - a natural uniter, a charismatic lover of life who seems unstoppable until her encounter with science almost destroys her. She is not a real person, you think while reading, yet she sets off this amazing tale and keeps you involved.The Echo Makers is one of the finest novels I've read, and Generosity, though slightly behind it, contains enough stunning writing and intelligence to make me recommend the book warmly
review 2: I really liked this book until it faltered at the end. Basically it's a satire on the well-known phenomenon of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in this case Thassa, a remarkably peppy Algerian immigrant. Just as in the movies, we have a depressed hero, Russell, but in this case he falls in love not with Thassa (which is good, because he meets her when he teaches a writing class that she's a student in) but with Candace, a therapist at the art school she attends. Thassa does bring them together, but not really in a cutesy romantic-comedy way, where Thassa is rescuing Russell at some personal sacrifice: instead, they're trying to defend her from the media crush that results when a prominent genetic researcher publishes results suggesting that she has the perfect genetic recipe for happiness, a formula he intends to exploit to make such happiness available to everybody. Powers expertly sketches the ever-increasing media hysteria, which culminates when the researcher sues Thassa after she reaches an agreement to sell her eggs, claiming that the genetic formula for happiness is his intellectual property. At this point, Powers is perfectly set up to deny that genes can determine destiny in this fashion, and I'm 100% behind him on this: given all we know now about the way that gene expression is affected by other genes and by environmental factors, the idea that there could be a happiness gene, or even set of genes, strikes me as absurd (in fact, in some ways the science in "Generosity" seems to be more out-of-date than that in the 20-year-old "Galatea 2.2"). But while Thassa's breakdown is the obvious path to take, Powers introduces multiple and unnecessary explanations for it. It's not enough to have Thassa simply break under the pressure: Powers suggests that maybe she's actually just a manic-depressive on a long-lived high, or possibly a fantasist who's been deluding everybody, even herself. These competing explanations distract from the story and do nothing to aid our understanding of Thassa. Plus, Powers wanders dangerously close to turning Thassa from a character into a mere instrument of Russell's salvation and the story into "How Russell Got a Life": when Candace, too, is forced to sacrifice for Russell's happiness, you start to wonder what Russell, who is kind of a schmuck, if in a good way, has done to deserve this. And in the end, Powers finds himself going back to the idea of happiness genes: after all, he made the science in favor of it so strong, it's hard to avoid it. However, if the ending is weak, the rest of the book makes up for it: Powers is an excellent writer, the book moves quickly, and he manages to make the characters, Thassa and Russell in particular, far more interesting than you might expect at first. less

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