Orfeo

Starred review from October 7, 2013
Seventy-year-old Peter Els, a divorced and retired adjunct professor living in suburban Pennsylvania, is the latest protagonist from Powers (who won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker). When Els’s dog has a heart attack, police respond to his 911 call and stumble into a room converted into an amateur biochemical engineering lab. While Els doesn’t have malicious intent—this is just the final phase of a life spent enthralled with creation, first musical, now chemical—the Feds are suspicious. Rapidly, Els becomes a fugitive from the law and a presumed domestic bioterrorist. As he flees west, he visits the people who have shaped his life, but are now estranged from him—his ex-wife, his ever-eccentric creative partner, his anxious daughter. The backstory of Els’s life, from childhood to the present, is woven expertly through his escape narrative. The shy, clarinet-toting boy is as believable as the young man in love, the awestruck father, and the out-of-touch husband. But the scenes at the University of Illinois in the 1960s—where John Cage stages epic musical performance pieces and Els, inspired, creates his own— are the most vivid. Powers’s talent for translating avant-garde music into engrossing vignettes on the page is inexhaustible. Els’s obsession with avant-garde music, which isolates him from everyone he loves, becomes the very thing that aligns him with the reader. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

July 1, 2014

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

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