by Richard Powers
Norton, 2014
352 pages
A Review of Richard Power’s Orfeo
I know I’m supposed to love Richard Powers’ Orfeo, and I do. Sort of. Powers’ precise eloquence is mouth-watering. Some of his characters, however, are less than compelling.
Orfeo tells a story of an intellectually alive composer, Peter Els, an early baby boomer, an old man who has spent much of his life grappling with modernism and post-modernism, i.e., the modern world.
The novel begins intriguingly with Els cooking up strange and wonderful musical scores, and also strange and more strange Petri dish experiments with DNA. His dog, Fidelio, shares an odd musicality, and solos in his own canine Mitch Miller sing-a-longs with Els’ compositions. Fidelio, an interesting character in the novel, dies and a distressed Els phones 911. Some cops show up, nose around, spot the Petri dishes. The next day, as Els returns from a weekly run, Homeland Security has taken over his house.
So Els keeps moving. And thinking. One of his many missteps, years past, was walking out on his wife, “who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.” Though he wouldn’t be Els if he hadn’t bolted — it’s a conundrum and one faced by many artists, makers, strivers after singular goals.
Earlier he’d followed his high school love to college and like nine point nine out of ten readers, was dumped. The many sequences with her, and about Els' childhood, were pulled from some authorial Central Casting of stock baby boomer events. Richard Powers has remarkable talent and these lapses are unfortunate.
About Els’ thoughts on composing, however, Powers produces great beauty, as in the reflection that “Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn't want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”
Synesthesia and/or a longing for the syndrome. A longing to express the exquisite version of the merely earthbound and sodden. “Then he started to hear them, those souls lined up in the celestial anteroom, awaiting reincarnation; all the preexisting sounds that only he might bring into being.”
The novel’s long digression on the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who was able to create in a German work camp, was spellbinding. When Powers deals with real and heady content he shines. He should fix attention only on the worthy. Strangely, I wanted to know more about the Homeland folk — easy enough to poke fun at, or even the cops who answered the first 911 call. I sensed that, like Els, they were odd and had Powers pressed down on them, well something juicy would have squeezed out.
There is much here for thinkers to identify with. And if the reader is one who often evaluates her life in moral or philosophic terms, well, she and Els can form a support group. As Els’ on-the-run journey into America, his meetings with friends and kin, adds mileage on the number of pages, the composer’s ultimate quest to understand — it — all of it — connection — spirit — the architecture of matter — clarifies. His chemical/biological experiments have been purposeful. Also, he learns to Tweet, and finally gets his fifteen minutes of fame.
It would be crass of me to in any way suggest you not read Orfeo or any other of Powers’ books, because in fact, you must read this novel. And as with much in life, be prepared to take in the good and toss the rest.
Reviewed by Sarah Sarai
Sarah Sarai's stories are in Gravel, Devil’s Lake, Storyglossia, Homestead Review, Fairy Tale Review, Weber Studies, Tampa Review, South Dakota Review, ragazine.cc, Unlikely Stories, and other journals. Her short story, “The Young Orator,” is a 2014 chapbook available for $5 + postage through
The Young Orator, Winged City Chaps, Sarah’s poetry collection, The Future Is Happy, was published by BlazeVOX; her poems are in journals including Thrush, Yew, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, and Ascent. Links to her book reviews, poems, and stories are at My 3,000 Loving Arms. She lives in New York.
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