Literature's dot-com years

If Richard Powers winning the National Book Award for The Echo Maker hadn't already convinced me I need to read his book, this article from The Independent would have finished the job. Here's just a piece of the fun:

When Powers gets excited, it's easy to see the enormously intelligent, slightly nerdy youth he must have been. Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1957, he grew up one of four children in a house animated by music. His father, a headmaster, would have guests over for musically accompanied singalongs. Powers's instrument was the cello. But he was also fascinated by the sciences. He wolfed down Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as a youngster, and later enrolled in the University of Chicago as a physics major, with an interest in technology. In his off-hours, he taught himself how to program computers - a skill that led him to his first and last day-job writing code in Boston. He had never considered writing until he saw a photograph of three farmers in a retrospective of August Sander's work. Two days later he quit his job to write their story.

As a young novelist, Powers's most powerful influences were James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, but it was coding that gave him an education in how to put a book together. "I think that discipline gave me many ways of thinking about form and structure as a fiction writer," he says. It is useful to remember that William Vollmann, who won the National Book Award last year, also began his career writing computer code. Their back-to-back wins are seen by many in New York circles as a kind of changing of the literary guard. Powers, however, believes that their rise in popularity reflects a shift in readers' acceptance of a new way of telling stories. "This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world. One of the things that Capgras really reveals is how dependent upon feeling idea is in order to be reliable at all."