Plowing the Dark

...Learning to live inside a PowRichard Powers And it is that physical depiction of ers novel is learning to live with excess Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 415 pp...

...After I overcame the redundant minstrels have no repermy initial distaste for the Martin narra- toire beyond the old songs of mutual tive, I found myself simultaneously Kosoro hatred and martial exploits...

...She novelistic: as it ponders how humans men Square, Tehran, and the Berlin has already abandoned her painting...

...One of its Plowing the Dark has a surfeit of intelliplots (there are two distinct stories, pre- gence, empathy, playful theory, seriValerie Sayers sented in alternating sections) concerns ous philosophy, loving literary alluthe artist Adie Kiarpol, who is recruit- sions and wit...

...In the second story, Powers's use of a technological illitjags, allows his characters to philoso- Taimur Martin, an Iranian-American, erate, Adie, allows him to explain, clearphize and to pontificate, puns shame- is kidnapped in Beirut, where he has ly and without condescension, how virlessly, displays the minutiae of his re- recently arrived to teach English...

...How can the church guide Rochester...

...Recurrent violent atdamned thing, at this late a date...

...In tual reality works and to what uses it search, and juggles the big questions captivity, struggling to stay alive and is being put...

...Jordan is onto something when ality as a "cultural construct...

...The emotional realities of Martin's Michael Ignatieff yours is really unique in the world...

...their hosts when it becomes clear that imprisoned for years...

...Car- sodomy in medieval theology, Jordan he becomes involved in an artificial-indiac infarction" and "heart attack" have noted that Thomas Aquinas regarded telligence program, and in the past as a the same descriptive referent but are ut- "sodomy" as a subcategory of the vice crucial love affair unravels...

...technological tools and toys...

...ly as the novel opens...

...More helpfully, one gentlewoman seeks off and deepened, moreover, by the re- to spur Gjorg and Vladan on to a new markable balance Powers strikes, ulti- and more inclusive cultural vision, mately, between structure and content...

...But, then, what is the kind of two-part construction: his last tain...

...In an ear- American Commerce...

...tic and thematic link to the story of Ismail Kadare Performing at the castle of a northern Taimur Martin, who, of course, also re- translated by Peter Constantine nobleman, Gjorg and Vladan infuriate sides in the Mideast, where he has been Arcade, $17-95,121 pp...

...Were the brutal events of last ing down the airplane aisle, and you year the catalyst for a decisive break with make it out...

...Church language seems never Powers has made a specialty of this proportion which is itself hard to ascer- to reach the subject...

...Computer sci- favorite here is the man describing his R a maximalist who inter- entists there are creating fantastic 3-D middle-aged sexual self: "the loin in weaves seemingly dis- spaces, simulations borrowed from real winter...

...reality that is at the heart of its con- and mess, but his enthusiasms and encerns...

...Besides, there are the ichard Powers is a novelist ed by an old college friend to work in a puns, which are gloriously awful: my of the more-is-more school, Seattle virtual-reality lab...

...creations allow for a much more expansive exploration of what it means to copy and to represent, what it means to live inside art...

...This is one of those University of Notre Dame, is the author of five didactic and heavy-handed, but Adie's books born of urgent need, the need to novels, including Brain Fever (Doubleday...

...great art...

...0 cialism of the gallery scene...

...he create their own realities, it moves its cannot name one music composer or characters through real time and real medicine or political problem without space, leaving them profoundly changed...

...However, a crop of human need...

...facts or words...

...new books considering the historical tence, one where the author is bigger As Gjorg, an Albanian, and Vladan, a background of the 1998-99 war in Kosothan the writer, one that sheds the Serb, wander out of the Balkans into vo and sifting the political fallout from Commonweal 36 September 8, 2000...

...His seventh novel, Plowing the must deal with the horror of his own cal and moral implications of a techDark, often appears to be aiming for a reality as he labors to fill his hours by nology that is capable of representing theory of everything, but it is also fully making sense of his past...

...In Plowing tered in very different tones of voice and of luxuria...

...then listing twenty others...

...Adie functions as the out(suffering, reality, the meaning of exis- sane while chained to a radiator, he sider and innocent learning the polititence...

...For God's sake, call it God...

...parate story lines, indulges in language life (and real art...

...With Tianan- reality in (nearly) all its dimensions...

...broader European integration and a The magnificent chapter describing postwar professional comeback seem Adie's final creation provides a stylis- Elegy for Kosovo doomed...

...The char- locked away nowhere, victim of the acters' statements about art-one says, world's shared failure, begging for Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the "Art is not capable of teaching"-are something to read...

...NATO intervention of 1999, what, if any, alone, to be abandoned, to abandon, to evidence do we have that the peoples of imagine and to represent God: "You Kosovo have begun to "sing of other turn in the entranceway of illusion, gap- things...

...But Jordan's book is not about facts, subject of sexuality...

...Body position or ro- novel, Gain, for instance, alternates the it is about words: the initial and most mantic poesy...

...Heart Dennis O'Brien, a regular contributor, is on narrative distance that makes strucattack" and "sex" are words with affect president emeritus of the University of tural sense but feels forced, particularand effect...

...in flight...

...As one exasperated lisreader who abides with Martin in his Virtual War tener puts it, "It is true that there is dissolitary cell will emerge spent and shak- Kosovo and Beyond sension everywhere, but dissension like en...

...dered irrelevant in the wake of the Turking Powers has committed to paper...

...Kosovo telling them bluntly, "You must sing of The motifs of both stories intersect and A Short History other things...

...isolation and Adie's moral crisis are set Henry Holt, $23, 246 pp...

...he can be a It also glories in depicting the mundane, pedantic name-dropper on subjects like Plowing the Dark the quotidian, the physical...

...group than in the population at large-a about sex...

...Powers has plenty of annoying stylistic quirks: his characters speak in relentlessly arch dialogue...

...a ish conquest...

...Adie begins her virtual POSTBELLUM reality experiments borrowing from paintings by Rousseau and van Gogh, and finally reproduces the interior of French and German lands in search of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the great safety and purpose, their attempts at basilica-turned-mosque...

...there is at least one sen- forces at the legendary Battle of Kosovo...

...history in the region, or have we sucThat's what we've called it forever, and Brian O. Phillips ceeded only in adding new verses to the it's so cheap, so self-promoting, to in- familiar, deadly ballads of ethnic and revent new vocabulary for every god- t the heart of his masterful ligious division...

...If I sound cranky, that may be because Powers's fictional worlds are so complex, so complete, that a reader begins to inhabit them, A VIRTUAL MASTERPIECE perhaps even to feel a little proprietary about them...

...Their epic journey follows the sigence in a town like Mitrovica-would Martin's narrative asserts, "On every defeat of the massed Christian armies seem to confirm the pessimism of Gjorg urgent page, in every book born of of southeastern Europe by the Ottoman and Vladan's critics...

...Conjugal act" and "having sex" eties) in a culture of consumerism and ly artificial for a novel about artifice: describe the same thing-as does the di- luxuria...

...Their recital dreading and longing for his story to War and Revenge appears even more absurd as this cencontinue...

...What is the cultural construct the Dark the two stories are separated have extraordinarily different rhetorical of sexuality (any of the fifty-seven vari- stylistically by a device I found strangeeffects...

...sexuality with the bureaucratized, sani- Wall as its backdrops, the novel spreads Given the all-male nature of priestly so- tized language of the moral manuals...

...The account of his incarcera- Tim Judah turies-old enmity has now been rention is one of the bravest pieces of writ- Yale University Press, $16.99,288 pp...

...Galatea 2.2 folit comes to the issue of official church lier book on the moral philosophy of lows its protagonist in the present, as language (rhetoric) about sexuality...

...Foucault domestic story of a woman dying of valuable section is titled "Church is not wholly wrong in regarding sexu- cancer with a very theoretical "Story of Words...

...The novel opens in 1990, as the ergies are more than worth the strewn world comes to terms with its emerging clothes and the crumbs on the counter...

...O the hostage's story is addressed to himalogue of R-rated films-but the rhetori- self in the second person, an insistence cal meanings are wildly different...

...merge, the dark of two worlds plowed Noel Malcolm Just over one year after the end of the by meditations on what it means to be HarperCollins, $16.99, 494 pp...

...Elegy for Kosovo, the Alban- tacks and campaigns of intimidation Whether or not Powers achieves a A ian fabulist Ismail Kadare against minority populations designed Theory of Everything, he comes very places the poignant tale of to create an exclusively Albanian Kosoclose to putting into practice a Theory two fourteenth-century minstrels joined vo-as well as continued Serbian intranof Everything a Novel Can Achieve...

...In itself across the globe, as if to emphaciety, it would be reasonable to conjec- that sense, there is not only a silence size its universality and the interdeture that homosexuality is higher in that about "sodomy," there is general silence pendence of humans everywhere...

...Commonweal 3 5 September 8, 2000 the not entirely convincing explanation weight of its dead fixations and throws hold out the most ancient questions of is that she has embraced commercial art off the lead of its prose, one sentence existence alongside the most contemin order to get away from the commer- that remembers the prisoner in his cell, porary visions of reality...