Richard Powers' 'Orfeo' sends a composer on the lam

ORFEO, by Richard Powers, W.W. Norton & Company, 369 pp., $26.95.

Peter Els, a "quiet, older bohemian," is engaged in a little do-it-yourself biochemical experiment in his Pennsylvania home. His wildly improbable scheme? To encode a musical score into the DNA of a species of bacteria. Then his beloved golden retriever, Fidelio, a music lover himself, suddenly dies.

Distraught, Els calls the police. They arrive, discover his jumble of scientific apparatus, and -- because we live in an age of heightened security and suspicion -- they summon federal anti-terrorist agents, who cordon off his house as a crime scene. Like a fool, Els flees, transforming himself into the very person he is not.

Thus begins Richard Powers' extraordinary new novel, "Orfeo." Not a terrorist on the lam but a retired professor of music, Els is a composer, a gentle, otherworldly dreamer, a restlessly curious visionary who wants only to add to the world's beauty. Like the legendary Orpheus, whose playing of the lyre charmed the gods, Els will also descend into Hell and destroy any chances for love.

Powers' novels have often dramatized the mysteries of creativity, especially Faustian attempts to comprehend the physical universe. Delving into these secrets, his scientist protagonists, in "The Gold Bug Variations" and "Galatea 2.2," probe the impact of scientific-technological advances on what it means to be human. Music-making, too, has inspired Powers, in "The Time of Our Singing." Now he mingles these earlier themes with contemporary fears about Big Brother tyranny, loss of privacy and media's lurch into the Misinformation Age.

Surging back and forth between Els' past and present, "Orfeo" brilliantly captures the utter strangeness of the creative enterprise, the urge to make something out of nothing. Once trained as a cellist, Powers understands that music -- that all of art -- is, by its very nature, dangerous and subversive. To reach transcendence, you must risk, break rules, court misunderstanding and rejection.

Does that make you a terrorist?

In flashbacks, the novelist depicts Els as a boy enchanted by the clarinet, then transported into musical heaven at Indiana University and the grad school hothouse of 1960s innovation at the University of Illinois. Els is shaped by the modernist classical-musical strictures of that era, and ultimately haunted by their dead-end culture. To make the new, he is instructed, he must make beauty the enemy.

"Art was combat," Els remembers. The point of music was not to move listeners but "to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits." "For years, he's struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone assured lasting admiration."

Powers brings his characters to life through vivid dialogue and language sometimes musical and always attentive to precise detail. Els' first love, Clara, is a sly muse who encourages him to compose. Els' wife, Maddy, pays the price for his commitment to music, then makes him pay with divorce. Their daughter, Sara, shapeshifts from little-girl companion to sullen teenage adversary to devoted middle-aged caretaker. Els' sometime friend, flamboyant theater director Richard Bonner, jump-cuts between goading him to new heights and berating him for mediocrity.

It's Bonner who entices Els into his greatest triumph, a work for New York City Opera based on a 16th-century German Christian utopia. By the time the feds are after him, Els has long since disavowed this opera and rediscovered the satisfactions of music as beauty. But now as he drives cross-country, news reports cite only his "audience-hostile" avant-garde compositions and slander him as the "Biohacker Bach."

"Orfeo" is an adventure story both up-to-the-minute and timeless. Government bearing down on the innocent? Media reports that confuse commentary with reportage? All this is as timely as Edward Snowden and Fox News. But think also of Shostakovich braving the killing fields of Stalin's Soviet Union, or Mahler fighting Viennese anti-Semitism. Whoever said creation was easy?

Yet Powers is equally adept at conveying just how thrilling the results of so much blood, sweat and tears can be. Long ago his books were criticized for being too coldly intellectual. I'm not sure that was ever true. In any case, here his evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page.

Peter Els emerges as one of the most fascinating characters of recent fiction, yet another brainy Powers protagonist struggling to survive within a society that can't make sense of him. "Orfeo" is a novel not only for music lovers but for readers who thrive on sophisticated fiction that still believes in stomach-churning storytelling. One again, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our finest novelists.