SOURCE: "Data for Data's Sake," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4469, May 8, 1992, p. 20.

In the following review, Porter offers a mixed assessment of The Gold Bug Variations, finding Powers's prose "temporarily exhilarating but ultimately exhausting."

Geneticists, we are told, are now busy finally decoding and rewriting all the scripts of life. Against this background, Richard Powers has had the clever, if deliberately perverse, idea of constructing a novel [The Gold Bug Variations] that mirrors this genetic quest: a novel not about the lives, hopes and fears of biologists trekking between the Double Helix and the human genome project, but one written as if it were itself a product of that enterprise, a novel whose form is "scientific".

A standard plot can be discerned. A top young American molecular biologist, Stuart Ressler, sets out in the 1950s to crack the genetic code. In the process, he is overtaken by...