Gold Bug Variations, The (1991)
By Richard Powers
Chaos theory; Genetic code; Genetic research
After the death of a once promising geneticist Stuart Ressler, his friend Jan studies genetics to better understand his life, and discovers that Ressler’s interest in Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” helped him to comprehend intricate genetic structures.
When Jan O’Deigh learns from her former lover, Franklin Todd, that their friend Stuart Ressler has succumbed to cancer, she quits her job as research librarian and embarks upon an intellectual journey into genetics to understand the life lost. She first encounters Ressler and Todd at the library branch at which she works; Ressler is interested in her daily factoids, and Todd is interested in unlocking his coworker Ressler’s secret past. She soon becomes obsessed with the man whose sole notation in the archives is an article about promising geneticists from the 1950s. Soon, she begins spending time with Todd and Ressler during their night shift, watching them juggle the computer files of major financial firms. Ressler slowly reveals his earlier occupation as a post-doctoral researcher in at the University of Illinois during the booming years following Watson and Crick’s Nature article. As his research team – nicknamed Cyfer – competes with other researchers in the quest to decode the double helix, Ressler finds himself falling in love with his coworker, Jeanette Koss. It is Jeanette who introduces him to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” an intricate movement with seamlessly overlapping variations on the same refrain. His interest in the structure of the music, eerily punctuated in series of 20 and 64 like the genome, offers him brilliant bursts of insight into the genetic apparatus. As his relationship with Jeanette dissolves, Ressler chooses a life outside genetics, although not outside the mysteries of science. The codebreaking techniques fostered with Cyfer allow Ressler and Todd to manipulate computer codes in order to save a friend.
Powers’s novel entwines Jan and Ressler’s turmoils with the grace and complexity of both the Bach and the genetic code that govern the action. Like the four scale-steps of the music and the four bases paired in DNA, the four characters follow the basic four-note variations that organize life like nature’s seasons. While Jan’s self-education into genetics offers her insight into the inner workings of the cell, she realizes that Ressler’s compulsion to “decode” is not based on the genes’ final product (the human itself) but on how the apparatus functions. Genetic research is complicated by the human need to develop metaphors for the incomprehensible: a code, a cipher, a map. Ressler’s contemporaries treat DNA like a message to be translated from one language to another, not realizing that language’s structure creates imperfect translations. Powers captures the atmosphere of innovation and constant revision as researchers in this booming field struggle to make meaning out of patterns, several groups converging on new discoveries in the field simultaneously only to revoke their findings as waves of new articles clog the journals. The essential gap between organisms is closed with DNA’s four-letter source material; Jan notes that the wolf and sheep are cut from the same genetic cloth. In learning about the genetic code, Jan and Ressler learn that mutations are merely musical variations for variety, and that life and relationships can be imperfectly reduced to codes even as they transcend them.
Evaluation: This difficult and brilliant novel juxtaposes the seemingly disparate worlds of aesthetic compositions with clinical scientific research to illustrate patterns governing all facets of existence.
– Natalie Champ