Title: Intriguing Novel of Ideas
Product review: We can only hope that Powers can one day surpass his wonderfully brilliant Gold Bug variations, but this may be his second best book. The romantic strands and existential depth of this work are more like Gold Bug than that more intellectual, analytic and distanced treatments of Galatea and Gain. There is a real humanity to this book, while the characters struggle with the meaning of life, especially one life, swimming in (or against) the tide of history.Powers is not for all tastes because he engages one at the level of ideas (as well). But if you like that stuff, I'd first get Gold Bug, but then I'd choose this.
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