SOURCE: "Father Knows Best," in Book World—The Washington Post, Vol. XVII, No. 15, April 10, 1988, p. 5.

Locke is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he summarizes Prisoner's Dilemma and notes that Powers has "an intense command of significant realistic details that can easily be assimilated to a larger symbolic pattern."

[Prisoner's Dilemma—an] unusually attractive and ambitious book by Richard Powers, whose first, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was warmly praised when it appeared three years ago, is an exceptionally loving fictional portrait of an American father and, simultaneously, a work of moral philosophy in the guise of a domestic novel with all the artful warmth and clutter we expect in the age of Updike. As it describes a family coping with Dad's fatal illness, it deploys the nostalgic paraphernalia of American popular culture from the World's Fair of 1939 (especially its vision of...