What Is the Meaning of Life?

By Paul Gray

THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS by Richard Powers

Morrow; 639 pages; $25

Some may find this novel's title, with its punning allusions to Bach's Goldberg Variations and Poe's short story The Gold Bug, a little too cute, and they are probably right. On the other hand, The Gold Bug Variations passes the truth-in-advertising test: the label accurately reflects the additives Bach and Poe to the contents inside and warns away consumers who prefer their fiction plain.

The rest are in for a read of dazzling, sometimes intimidating complexity, which includes, among many, many other things, two love stories, separated by a quarter-century but analogous in a number of tantalizing ways; a detective story, pieced together from random clues, tracing the disappearance of a brilliant young scientist from a quest that seemed to promise him a Nobel Prize; a sprinkling of charts, tables and graphs; thumbnail histories of Western music and painting and of newer subjects like information theory and computer programming; a white-knuckle account of the race to find the meaning of life within a molecule; and the constant hum of intellectual enchantment.

This sinuous story begins near its conclusion, in June 1985. Jan O'Deigh, an employee at a Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library, receives a note from her former lover Franklin Todd: Stuart Ressler is dead. Grieving, Jan remembers the day some three years earlier when Todd first appeared at her desk and requested information about Ressler. "What was the man's line of work?" she had asked. "Don't know for sure," came the reply. "Something hard. Something objective, I mean." And why did he want to know about Ressler? "I work with him."

All true, Jan discovers. Using her formidable research skills, she digs up references to Ressler in 1958, including a small photograph in LIFE with the caption "Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life." And then she is taken to meet Ressler himself, at a nearby renovated warehouse where he and Todd, an art-history graduate student stalled on his dissertation, work the night shift for a computer billing outfit.

Jan, approaching 30, falls in love with Todd, four years her junior, and, in a different way, with Dr. Ressler, who is entering his 50s and who "came as close as anyone I've ever met to demonstrate that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete." With Todd now vanished and Ressler gone, she impulsively quits her job to record the months the three of them spent together -- talking all night while the computers whirred, enjoying a snowbound weekend in New Hampshire -- and to find out what happened to Stuart Ressler and why.

These two strands of story coil around each other, and the suspicion gradually arises that more than one narrator has been at work here. But the sources are less important than the patterns and the possibilities of meaning hiding within them. The movement begins with Ressler in 1957, fresh from graduate school at age 25, arriving at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign to join Cyfer, a research team assembled to crack the genetic code of the DNA molecule. The infant field is electric with excitement; scarcely four years have passed since Crick and Watson proposed the double- helix model for DNA -- intertwining strings of four chemical bases -- and already the opportunity of reading these combinations and putting life on a map seems within reach.

On the surface, the solution looks like a question of decoding, the kind of feat that leads to the discovery of buried treasure in The Gold Bug. But Ressler is not so sure: "We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us. Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand." Further complicating his quest for pure knowledge, Ressler falls in love with Jeanette Koss, four years his senior, a married member of the Cyfer team. She gives him a present, a well-worn recording of the Goldberg Variations: "Four notes, four measures, four phrases, pouring out everything." Might this not be the way DNA works its quartet of chemicals into endless diversity?

And the four main characters of the novel -- Jan and Todd, Jeanette and Ressler -- describe some dazzling, antiphonal permutations on their own. Both women are, for different reasons, unable to bear children; they are dedicated or interested onlookers at the mysteries of generation. Both men can be accounted failures, Ressler because he left a brilliant career and Todd because he lacks the nerve to begin one. But each is a welcome rarity in contemporary fiction: an intelligent, interesting and sympathetic actor in the drama of daily life.

Richard Powers, 34, is the reclusive author of two earlier highly praised novels, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) and Prisoner's Dilemma (1988). His work on The Gold Bug Variations, which began in 1986, was aided by a 1989 MacArthur Foundation "genius fellowship." Seldom photographed or interviewed, he put himself on display during a brief prepublication visit to his native U.S. -- he was born and raised in the Midwest -- before returning to the Netherlands, where he has lived for the past five or so years. He says his brush with publicity was less painful than he had feared: "Self-promotion is not easy for me. But there's a paradox here. The point of avoiding attention is not to become too self-conscious; at a certain point, the avoidance becomes self-conscious. I'm eager to get back to writing." On the evidence of this masterly novel, the world should allow Richard Powers to work in peace.