SOURCE: "Fiction Chronicle," in Partisan Review, Vol. LIX, No. 2, 1992, pp. 282-95.

In the following excerpt, Bell offers a negative assessment of The Gold Bug Variations, stating that Powers's "brilliance, in the end, serves little purpose beyond his irrepressible exhibitionism."

One can't help wondering what readers—other than editors and reviewers lashed to the mast of duty—Richard Powers had in mind when he embarked on his inordinately complicated and exhausting third novel, The Gold Bug Variations. Surely not "the common reader," if such a creature still exists. Powers is a very clever fellow, highly acclaimed these days, a thirty-four-year-old polymath, the winner of a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, who was trained as a physicist but gave up science for literature. On closer examination he hasn't given up science at all, just put it to a different use. Very long, densely packed stretches of the novel are devoted to the...