January 10, 2010
Generosity by Richard Powers
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

Everybody wants to be happy. But does anyone want to be happy all the time? Without shades of melancholy grey, wouldn’t perpetual bliss make life unbearably bland, a sort of whited-out death on earth?

These questions stand at the heart of Richard Powers’s provocative 10th novel. Set in contemporary Chicago, it ponders the fast-approaching time when neuroscience will allow us to control our emotions. The story centres on Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old Algerian immigrant who has fled that nation’s brutal civil war after the slaughter of most of her family. Although she has much more reason to be depressed than the self-involved American students at her film school, Thassa is the picture of happiness, emerging from the “walking corpse” of Algeria “glowing like a blessed-out mystic”.

Not surprisingly, that sort of personality doesn’t go unnoticed in a nation founded on the pursuit of happiness. Her writing professor, Russell Stone, a depressed has-been, quickly falls in love with her and starts to worry that her apparent happiness might be a case of “massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder”. After Thassa sees off a would-be rapist by the sheer positive power of her personality, there is no longer any chance of hiding her brilliant light under a bushel. She comes to the attention of Thomas Kurton, a visionary geneticist who believes she can help him isolate the happiness gene. After he apparently hits pay dirt, the media circus comes to town, leading to blanket coverage in the national press and an invitation to appear on an Oprah-type chat show. In a country where happiness is seen as something that can be purchased on the open market, Thassa becomes “pretty much a publicly traded commodity”. Soon, the pressure threatens to take a toll on her that Algeria’s death squads were never able to exact.

Powers, whose previous novel The Echo Maker won the National Book Award, has always been adept at exploring the problematic frontiers of contemporary science. Here, his acuity and satire are as sharp as ever, allowing him to deconstruct brilliantly the commercially charged world of genome mapping, where a few Brahmins are well on the way to patenting and controlling the stuff of our being. “Homo sapiens is already divided…into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame ­living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products.”
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He also takes some effective swipes at the mass media and at college writing courses, where “feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news”.

What really makes Generosity tick, however, are its characters, who are as multifaceted and alive as any Powers has ever created. Kurton is the sort of rabid capitalist who makes optimism seem like one of the seven deadly sins. His belief in a future where everyone will be bathed in gladness should make readers long to retreat back into the gloom of our depressing past. Stone is also a fine creation, a gifted nonfiction writer whose 15 minutes of fame ended when he realised he didn’t have the stomach for telling unhappy truths about his fellow man.

It is Thassa, though, who holds pride of place in the novel. With her, Powers shows that a predisposition for bliss can, ironically, make a person’s life hell. As the corporate smiley faces begin to close in on Thassa, the reader is placed in the unusual position of rooting for a beloved heroine by wishing a bracing dose of misery on her