Sarah talks with Richard Powers.

While the New York papers don’t seem to be having a lot of luck these days talking with Richard Powers before the National Book Awards, yet another Chicago media outlet nabs an interview with Powers: this time, it’s the Chicago Reader. It’s an interesting interview. Here, for example, is s Powers on the midwestern narrative:

I don’t think there’s a single midwestern narrative. I’ve tried different ways in several books to tap into some of those long rhythms that the midwest invites us to hear. But it’s a subtle place that opens up only gradually as you keep looking at it, and keep listening.

But I think there’s something else about the midwest. It’s the portion of the country that supports the coasts and makes the coasts possible, so it’s absolutely essential to how the American mind works in its role as a kind of primary producer for all the rest of this complex ecosystem. So that’s always intrigued me: America stripped bare. America without props and without distractions or disguises and protections.

Scott has an excellent Friday column on Richard Powers:

But if in Powers we lose a sense of mystery, we gain a sense of wonder. One of the most striking aspects of a Powers novel is the sense of genuine amazement at the natural world that the reader is left with. This is no small achievement tn an era in which it is often remarked that space shuttle flights are no longer televised because they have become so commonplace, so banal. Powers reveals a very real, very necessary awe at science and nature. This is no preachy exercise, no citing of facts and figures; it is something that is communicated through the stories and metaphors, something that takes hold of you as you read without Powers needing to lay it out for you. It is humbling, which I believe is exactly Powers’s point, to re-instill a needed sense of humility as humans gain truly God-like powers over their environment. This is something that neither Pynchon nor DeLillo does, something I think only a Richard Powers could do.

As bad as William Deresiewicz’s Echo Maker review was, it doesn’t hold a candle to the silly leaps in logic laid down by Craig Seligman, who accuses Richard Powers of victimizing Oliver Sacks:

Modeling Weber so closely on Sacks was mildly insane, because it points you toward Sacks’s rigorous prose — next to which the heated emotions and the elaborate literary scaffoldings in this book seem overcomplicated and false. If there’s exploitation here, the victim is Oliver Sacks.

Given that there are probably no more than a few pages of “Weber”‘s work within The Echo Maker, I’m wondering precisely how Powers has pointed towards Sacks’ prose (Sacks’ ideas and techniques, perhaps; but what does Sacks’ prose style have to do with it?). I believe it can be safely stated that Sacks was certainly one of the inspirations for the Weber character, but I think it’s up to the reader to determine these implicit connections.