Gen Voor Geluk: Een Revisie (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
I read this a while ago, but remember being intrigued with the premise of it. What if our happiness turns out to have a genetic basis? What would the drug companies do who live off other's depression? Is someone who is perpetually happy and kind better than the rest of us or merely maladaptive and a perpetual patsy? Powers explores what happens when a person who remains fundamentally happy, despite her devastating past, turns out to have a particular gene and then is made into a celebrity because of it. The idea is very cool, but the characters were less finely drawn and Power's playing with story is sometimes jarring. Still, a good read. A young girl strikes a big American city like a meteorite. She fled a civil war and, via Paris and Montreal, disembarks in the metropolis. Her radiance and appetite for life transfixes those who have the privilege of orbiting around her. The circumstances remind us of the real-world work of epidemiologist Aaron Antonovsky who, in the 1960s and 70s was struck in his research by how certain women who had survived the Holocaust were able to sustain a rich and positive outlook on life. Antonovsky reoriented his research to try to understand how this was possible (“Had it been just one woman, it would still have been important to find out why”!) which led him to develop an original and important theory of health. Also Richard Powers takes this phenomenon as the start for a process of inquiry.From the immigrant’s dazzling presence he conjures two major questions: ‘How are we to live?’ and ‘How are we to know?’. The novel lets then two sense-making and life-making paradigms collide: the scientific and the narrative. The scientist (or, better, the scientist-entrepreneur) is on a visionary quest to lay bare the order in things and to explore the upper limits of human ingenuity (in sofar as this continues to provide venture funders with a reasonable short-term return). And that includes rewiring our genomic apparatus to “make ourselves over into anything we want”. Happiness should not be left to chance; it’s a neurochemical design challenge.For the narrator (or novelist, or mythographer) happiness emerges from a tangled web of relationships. “Happy people have stronger social relationships, more friends, better jobs, higher salaries, and stronger marriages. They are more creative, more altruistic, calmer, healthier, and longer lived.” But the causalities aren’t always clear. And there are contingencies, and human fallibility. From this messiness and from this abundance of possible relationships the narrator constructs a story, and hence imposes some sort of sense on the world. The paradigmatic difference between the ‘objective’ and utopian scientist and the narrator who is all too conscious of the inescapable fragility of human life is played out quite literally in this novel. Powers overlays it with another dilemma that is rooted in the foundational problem of freedom. Imposing order is never an innocent business. Narrators make normative judgments. And those judgments may have unwanted or unintended consequences. One of the characters in a short-story authored by one of the protagonists (drawn from real life) commits suicide because he rebelled against the irreversible framing by the narrative. So how to navigate this dilemma between order and freedom? How to write a story of “the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice but chance?”Scientists have to deal with a similar conundrum. In the hypercomplex universe of genomics, the data are always more or less inconclusive. “Genes don’t code for traits. They synthesize proteins. And single proteins can do incredibly different things, depending on where or when they’re produced … “ Deciding where to put the line between nature and nurture, between determinism and freedom, is, for the time being, also in science an unresolved issue. Richard Powers’ books invariably are novels of ideas. This double dilemma – between science and story-telling, between determinism and freedom – seems to me to be the philosophical backbone of the book. There are other themes that Powers weaves in with characteristic brio. But at the center remains the young girl, Generosity, for whom the whole challenge of ‘happiness’ is a mirage: “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.
What do You think about Gen Voor Geluk: Een Revisie (2009)?
Après un démarrage un peu long, l'histoire prend son envol entre science et humanité.
—Toribug
I have to look up at least one word every 4 pages. This is either a good or bad thing.
—wolfloverapril
this was the easiest to read of his books that I've read so far...
—LeAbreuu
hated it- felt like I'd been tricked re. ending
—lovelesswrists
