SOURCE: "Beautiful Dreamers," in Book World—The Washington Post, Vol. XXIII, No. 24, June 13, 1993, p. 2.

Bawer is an American critic. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of Operation Wandering Soul, praising Powers's prose but questioning his depiction of American society.

If by some measures Richard Powers is the most gifted American novelist of his generation, he is also one of the most unjustly neglected. Though reviewers have been praising him fervently ever since the 1985 appearance of his first novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, and though his third novel, The Gold Bug Variations, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and named Time magazine's 1991 book of the year, the 35-year-old Powers has yet to win the wide readership he deserves.

There's no mystery why this is so. Powers's novels are engaging, even exhilarating; almost every sentence invites one to pause and...