IS IT PREMATURE to talk of the "Powers Problem"? For the last three decades, Richard Powers has been bringing out hefty novels at the rate of one every 2.5 years: 11 in all. At his current age of 56, he is, as a novelist, midway on life's path; presumably he has another 11 or so novels still in him. Powers has won a National Book Award and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; he has been the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant"; he has elicited lavish praise from the critics - most of them, anyway. Two of the words most frequently employed in connection with his literary output are "cerebral" and "ambitious." "Cerebral" refers to his tendency to lace his novels with scientific and scholarly themes, like artificial intelligence in "Galatea 2.2," game theory in "Prisoner's Dilemma" and musicology cum genetic recombination in "The Gold Bug Variations." "Ambitious" refers to his penchant for fashioning narrative structures and symbolic networks on a heroic scale. These words cut both ways. "Cerebral" suggests a surfeit of ideas at the expense of life: more head than heart. And "ambitious" . . . well, that's a terrible thing to say about a writer of novels; it's like calling a politician "brave." It suggests that the novelist has set aims for himself that he is doubtfully capable of attaining. And for Powers's severest critics, the aim at which he signally fails is that of creating fully human characters with interesting motives and emotions. His rather conventional stories of love and loss, they say, never take flight. As the critic James Wood put it in The New Yorker, Powers "makes beautiful connections between concepts (genetics, music, computers, consciousness, memory), but primitive and mechanistic connections between his characters." Everyone concedes that Powers is prodigiously talented. Besides being fearfully erudite, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life. He has every gift, it is sometimes implied, but the gift of literature. That is our Powers Problem. Each new novel he produces becomes an occasion to ask whether this time, at last, he has succeeded in fusing ideas and life into an organic whole. In "Orfeo," the ideas have to do (again) with genetics and music. The life is that of an avant-garde composer named Peter Els, who, as the novel opens, is a washed-up 70-year-old living in a college town in Pennsylvania. Peter, we learn, has had a lifelong passion for abstract patterns - patterns that, he fondly hopes, will allow him "to break free of time and hear the future." He once pursued such patterns in the realm of experimental music, only to leave audiences nonplused by his innovative compositions ("36 variations on 'All You Need Is Love,' in the style of everyone from Machaut to Piston"). Now, in his solitary retirement, he has moved on to DNA. In his kitchen he has set up an amateur genetics lab. Using equipment ordered from online biopunk shops, he is trying to manipulate the genome of a common (but not necessarily harmless) bacterium, Serratia marcescens. His goal is to splice musical patterns into living cells. Let us defer, for the moment, the question of whether this is an admirable goal, or even a sane one. We have more to discover about Peter Els. And we are soon to do so when suspicions about his biohacking lead to a raid by hazmat-suit-clad agents of Homeland Security and, in a panic, he takes flight. "Flight," it might be noticed, is in Latin fuga, the root of "fugue." And the rest of the novel, indeed, has something of a musical structure. As Peter - soon labeled by the media the "Bioterrorist Bach" - hits the road, he hatches a scheme to achieve the transcendence he has always sought. In counterpoint with this final journey of redemption, the story of the fugitive's life is retrospectively told. This story (it appears to me) comprises four movements, each dominated by a character Peter has loved, flourished with and finally become estranged from: his girlfriend when he was a teenager, an elfin student cellist with "four feet of hair," whose breasts he held as he discovered the depths of musical passion; his ex-wife, who sustained him (up to a point) as he struggled to invent a radically new musical language in the delirious 1960s; his turbulent friend and artistic collaborator, who draws him into composing a historical opera that becomes a succès de scandale when it seems to presage the fiery finale to the F.B.I.'s 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex.; and his daughter, whom he calls "my only decent composition" even though she regards his whole life as "naïve and misguided." These characters are not free of the flaws Powers is often taxed with. They can be clunkily sentimental; they descend to cliché ("We had energy. We had ideas"); their motives are sometimes conventional, sometimes obscure. Nor is the patented lyricism of Powers's writing always effective. For every happy hit ("The predawn sky was beginning to peach"), there's a wince-maker like "skirting a cairn of cat turd" - the full horror of which is apparent only if you realize that "cairn" is pronounced "kern." Why, then, was I unable to resist the emotional pull of "Orfeo"? Why did I pick it up eagerly each day and find myself moist-eyed when I came to its last pages? That, I think, has everything to do with Powers's skill at putting us into the mind of his protagonist. Peter Els is blessed (or cursed) with an almost painfully exquisite musical sensibility. Throughout "Orfeo" we experience tonal patterns of all kinds - from bird song to the overtone series of a single piano note to the "caldera of noise" at a John Cage happening and the "naked pain" in the Largo of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony - filtered through Peter's lyrical consciousness. In one of the novel's most virtuosic passages, which goes on for a dozen pages, Peter dilates on the transcendent beauties of Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," composed and first performed in the brutal conditions of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. All of which heightens and makes unbearably poignant Peter's own losing struggle to "recover a fugitive language" that might capture something of eternity. If only this struggle hadn't led him to tinker with the genome of a bacterium! I say this not for public safety reasons but for aesthetic ones. Peter has come to see, in molecular genetics, a quasi-musical language. Encoded in the millions of base pairs of DNA, he imagines, are "astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B minor sound like a jump-rope jingle." If he could insert a little pattern of his own into the bacterial DNA, then that unheard "music" might enjoy a sort of immortality, perhaps surviving the destruction of mankind. But this is not a beautiful idea, as Peter seems to think. It is a slightly obscene one. The DNA in any organism encodes, in nature's own language, a detailed history of the environment in which that organism evolved. It is a knowledge-bearing structure, a sort of poem composed by time and chance. To alter even a bit of it for would-be artistic purposes is tantamount to aesthetic vandalism - like spraying a graffiti message on the Parthenon. Does Richard Powers believe his protagonist's idea is beautiful? It is, of course, a fallacy to attribute the views of a fictional character to its author - even if, in the case of Peter Els, the character has been given hair identical to that of the author ("A gray but still-thick Beatles mop hangs in his eyes"). But I can't help thinking that the emotional power of "Orfeo" is diminished a little by this unhappy genetic conceit. It seems that the Powers Problem - producing novels that are more head than heart - has here turned into its opposite. JIM HOLT is the author of "Why Does the World Exist?"

Powers, who won the 2006 National Book Award for The Echo Maker, here serves up a sprawling, epic tale of melody and memory. Peter Els, who was a chemistry major in his youth as well as a musician, has been running home-grown gene-splicing experiments to determine if musical aptitude and appreciation are a genetic phenomenon and whether either can manifest in animals. Unfortunately, when his dog dies and Els dials 911, government agents suspect more sinister motivations, and Els finds himself an unlikely outlaw, the "Bioterrorist Bach." A fugitive at the end of his life, Els travels cross-country to say goodbye to those he cares for most, including his daughter, ex-wife, and closest friend. The real journey Powers takes us through, however, is the trip through Els's memories, with extensive passages describing in luxurious detail the power and texture of various musical masterpieces that Els associates with such historic events as 9/11 and with his triumphs and failures. Masterful narrator Christopher Hurt gives passion and clarity to passages that might have seemed overly dry or scholarly from a less skilled reader. This is a beautifully written, emotionally evocative, and intellectually challenging bit of fiction. Not all audiences will have the patience to understand it-the book relies very heavily on the listener's ability to appreciate long, eloquent analysis of classical music pieces, for example-but those who do are in for a treat. VERDICT Recommended for larger libraries. ["A very well-written and philosophical work," read the review of the Norton hc, LJ 11/15/13.]-Claire Abraham, Keller P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.