The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism and mystery

Time of plot: 1950’s to 1970’s

Locale: Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Brooklyn, New York

Principal characters

• Stuart Ressler, a molecular biologist
• Jeanette Koss, a colleague of Ressler, with whom he has an affair
• Jan O’Deigh, a reference librarian
• Franklin Todd, a graduate student in art history, and Jan’s lover

The Story:

Jan O’Deigh, a reference librarian at the Brooklyn branch of the New York City Library, quits her job to study genetics. She has just received a four-line postcard from Franklin Todd, her former lover, informing her of the death of their mutual friend, Stuart Ressler, a molecular biologist.

Franklin came to know Ressler when they both worked at a menial late-night job doing computer billing. Ressler had been obsessed with listening to the Glenn Gould recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s musical composition The Goldberg Variations (1741). He became intrigued and challenged by the sheer complexity and symmetry of the composition.

He had received the recordings a quarter of a century earlier as a gift from his lover, Jeanette Koss, a married colleague at the University of Illinois. This affair had devastated Ressler. Koss had decided to pack up and leave Champaign-Urbana with her husband, who got a new job some distance away.

Franklin thinks about the past and tells the following story, curious as he is about Ressler: Franklin is a graduate student in art history, pecking away somewhat futilely on a doctoral dissertation about an obscure sixteenth century Flemish artist. He is curious about his coworker, Ressler, at his night job. He goes to the library and asks the reference librarian to find for him what information she can about Ressler.

Jan, the librarian, begins to have romantic feelings for Franklin, but she soon develops an academic interest in Ressler as well. She also is interested in the work at which he had distinguished himself before abandoning his scientific career. She discovers that he was once cited in Life magazine for his work in genetics at the University of Illinois; his colleagues included James D. Watson and Francis Crick, two Nobel-prize-winning geneticists who helped unravel the mystery of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule.

Ressler and his fellow molecular biologists at the University of Illinois, as the story goes, are looking into the origins of life. They are seeking to unravel genetic codes. Soon they discover what turns out to be a disarmingly simple explanation of the origins of life: the double helix of the DNA molecule. Their codiscovery of the double helix, which explains how living matter manufactures itself, becomes perhaps the most significant scientific advance in the twentieth century. Ressler has been deeply involved in this research for decades.

Ressler (whose name suggests that he is wrestling with his problems) is something of an oaf. Socially inept, he holes up (as opposed to lives) in an unattractive, undecorated apartment, eats whatever food is around—specifically, dry cereal and cold water—and has little life outside his laboratory. He is faced with a dilemma: His realization that the human need for companionship is often thwarted by the human need for the physical manifestations of love.

Ressler attempts to combine the two needs by having an affair with his married colleague, Koss, four years his senior. Just when he is finding a way to assuage the overwhelming loneliness that is his lifelong companion, he writes a letter to Koss broaching the question of their forming a long-term commitment. Koss scuttles his plan by telling him of her husband’s taking a new job away from Champaign-Urbana. She has decided to follow her husband, and end her affair with Ressler.

Devastated at the thought of losing Koss, Ressler packs up and leaves Champaign-Urbana, too, taking with him his recordings of the Goldberg Variations. He had cowritten one article on his research, and it was published with the name of his colleague, Ulrich, as the primary author, although Ressler’s name should have been listed in that position.

It is more than twenty years later, when Jan meets Franklin at the Brooklyn library. Ressler had already met Jan fleetingly, but the two have no connection, at least until Franklin, Ressler’s coworker, comes on the scene. Ressler, who has had little physical contact with other people, touches Jan’s shoulder with the vigor of one unused to physical contact to alert her to an error in one of the library’s displays. He had stumbled upon the display on an earlier trip to the library.

Franklin knows little about his coworker in the computerized billing operation. He and Jan soon discover that more than two decades earlier Ressler had been written up in a Life magazine article that includes a beguiling picture of him.

In time, Franklin and Jan become romantically involved. Franklin takes Jan to visit Ressler, who is now in his early fifties. He has reduced his life to its bare necessities and no longer feels the need to compete. The two, having come to know Ressler better, spend a memorable weekend in New Hampshire with him; they are all snowed in.

Most people would consider Ressler a failure, a social dropout, but he is content with his life. During the quiet nights that Franklin and Jan spend with Ressler in his bailiwick at Manhattan On-Line, they have long conversations. The computers they have programmed do their solitary work in virtual silence.

Later, Jan and Franklin go their separate ways. Franklin had had a casual affair with Annie Martens, a bank teller, while he was still with Jan, leading to their breakup. Jan and Franklin come together again after Ressler’s death of lung cancer, and they seek to revive their relationship. Jan complains that such a reconciliation might not last, to which Franklin replies that no one has said anything about it lasting.

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. “In the Heart of the Heartland.” The New York Review of Books 53 (December 21, 2006): 58-60. Although this is a review of Powers’s The Echo Maker, Atwood comments brilliantly on the whole corpus of the author’s work and compares him favorably to Herman Melville in the scope and depth of his writing.

Baker, John F. “Richard Powers: The Brilliant Young Novelist Is Finally Emerging from His Self-Imposed Anonymity—Almost.” Publishers Weekly 238 (August 16, 1991): 37-38. This first major published interview with Powers followed the publication of The Gold Bug Variations. It emphasizes Powers’s insistence that the book rather than its author is of prime importance.

Burn, Stephen J., and Peter Dempsey, eds. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. Three of the eighteen essays in this useful collection deal directly with The Gold Bug Variations. Many of the other essays touch on elements of this novel. Of particular note are essays by Stephen J. Burn, Barry Lewis, and Patti White.

Dewey, Joseph. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. This first book-length critical biography of Powers devotes one chapter to biography and one chapter to each of Powers’s novels from Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance to Plowing the Dark.

LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique 38 (Fall, 1996): 12-17. A comparative assessment of the three most prominent postmodern novelists of the early twenty-first century.

Powers, Richard. “An Interview with Richard Powers.” Interview by Jim Neilson. Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1998): 13-23. Powers offers insights into his theories about the function of fiction and about the broad philosophical scope of his writing. Includes insightful information about The Gold Bug Variations.