A Review of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

In his Paris Review interview, Richard Powers expressed his longing for a sensory deprivation tank where he could dictate his writing with absolutely no distraction. Reading his many novels about characters obsessed with science, technology, and art, you can imagine him floating in the darkness emitting one flowing brilliant, lyrical paragraph after the next; winking at us, too, from his silent chamber as he draws attention to his process of creation and self-reflection.

Throughout his three decade career, with a rare courage and relentlessness, Powers has searched for the right form to tell his characters’ stories while dramatizing the forces of history pressing against them, striving to incorporate essay-like commentary without breaking the fictional dream. While there seems to be near universal acclaim for Powers’s genius, his talent for writing emotionally palpable characters is often questioned: a recent New York Times review even gives a name to his alleged Achilles’s heel, “The Powers’s Problem.” Justified or not, this rap has caused Powers to be pigeonholed as too cerebral, as if his fiction is too smart for its own good.

Powers’s latest, Orfeo, doesn’t attempt to solve the so-called Powers’s Problem. It obviates it with a glorious abundance of what Powers does best. Indeed, among the many delights of this, yes, cerebral, provocative, but also moving tour-de-force is to watch Powers playfully scold his critics that, however well-intentioned, their judgments are inconsequential to the pursuit of art.

The modern-day Orpheus at the heart of the novel is Peter Els, an avant-garde composer and amateur chemist spending his retirement trying to code musical notation in the DNA of a bacterium. The feds want to bring in Els for questioning about his unusual hobby, prompting Els, now an alleged bioterrorist, to flee from his home, causing a nationwide panic propagated by social media. As Els evades his pursuers, he considers the critical choices he’s made in his life during his coming of age as a musician and composer in the fifties and sixties and in the subsequent decades as he struggled to make art and a life. This is no slow rumination. Powers drives the narrative with a propulsive immediacy, deftly quick-cutting between past and present.

Els’s love of music is intertwined with the people who influenced him, beginning with his first love, Clara, “who listened to eight-hundred-year-old conductus as if it were a news flash…Before Clara, no piece had any real power to hurt him. After, he heard danger everywhere.” Here’s Els listening to Clara’s cherished Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children):
At first, there’s only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from bare fourths and fifths.

The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. Now the sun will rise so brightly…

The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle.
In these musical passages, Powers marries a technical and emotional clarity with descriptions of dramatic beauty, letting the reader feel what it feels like to be Els lying with his young girlfriend, listening to Mahler for the first time, as refracted through the wise, emotive sensibility of an old composer.

Indeed, the moral center of the novel may be a music appreciation lecture Els gives at a retirement home about Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The story of how Messiaen composed and performed his masterwork in a Nazi prison camp is an extraordinary thirteen page set piece of thematic bravado brought to the forefront of the narrative, demonstrating like so many other facets of this book the mastery Powers has achieved due to his bold experiments in form.
When the last notes die out in the frozen air, nothing happens. The captive audience sits in silence. And in silence, awe and anger, perplexity and joy, all sound the same. At last there’s applause. The prisoners in their clogs and bottle-green Czech uniforms fall back into the world and make an awkward bow. And then, Le Boulaire will recall decades later, lots of unresolved discussions, about this thing that no one had understood.
Along with his education in listening, we also experience Els’s nascent urge to make music like a joyful itch that will never go away. Here’s Els in college, after being provoked by Clara to give up his aspiration to be a chemist to be a composer.
For the next five weeks, when he should have been studying for final exams, he worked in secret. He stole hours from labs, from classes, even from Clara, who turned giddy with concealed suspicion. He took to working in lightning shorthand, sketching out music in quick, clean strokes, the way a child might scribble a crayon moon, a loopy forest, and a gash of campfire, and call it night.  There was no time for orchestration. The thing unfolded on the simplest scale, for solo piano and voices. But he heard every line in massed banks of instrumental color.  The wayfaring winds, the swelling support of brass, a raft of low strings bearing forward.
Els eventually loses Clara and “strange, vital, viral creations began pouring out of him.” In the early 60s, he enrolls in graduate school in Champaign-Urbana, “a breeding ground for mutant musical strains surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn, soybean, and rural, religious American in every direction,” where Els struggles to find his way as the world is tearing down the old rules. Powers captures the serious urgency of a naive young artist, as in this cutting scene in class when Els praises a performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs, only to be derided by his classmates.
A stunned Els appealed to the professor.

It’s a great piece, don’t you think?

The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.

Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.

He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.
And, later that semester, after composing his work, Rapture, for chamber orchestra, soprano, and reel-to-reel tape machines, he receives the full gamut of critiques from his professors.
Mattison condemned the finished piece as decorative. Johnston liked the virtuoso reach, but wanted something more purged of familiar harmonic gestures. Hiller found it intriguing but inchoate. And Brün wanted to know how such music helped bring about a just society.

Els squirreled away his teachers’ cavils and crafted his revenge.
You can imagine Powers squirreling away his critics’ cavils to craft his revenge, too, by inventing even more innovative ways to tell his stories –– looking forward but also looking back as does Els, his alter-ego:
In secret, he returned to the exhausted vocabularies of the old masters, looking for lost clues, trying to work out how they’d managed, once, to twist the viscera and swell whatever it was in humans that imagined it was a soul. Some part of him could not help believing that the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backward into the future.
Els falls for a singer named Maddy, who drives a microbus likes she’s sailing on ice, who he admires for her openness to the revolution they are living. “He loves her steady refusal to descend to liking or not liking, those sentimental actions that have nothing to do with listening to music.” For, this novel, more than a biotech thriller or bildungsroman, is a love story, first between Els and Clara, then Els and Maddy, who becomes his wife, and still later, with Els’s daughter, Sara, who Els comes to thinks of in the end as his only decent composition.

After he becomes a husband and father, Els continues to engage in the combat of art, but he finds it impossible to stay fit for long. His compulsion eventually causes him to give up his wife and also his daughter who grows up a stranger living half a continent away. And after decades living as a recluse, Els’s compulsion eventually drives him to rekindle his love of chemistry to attempt his most ambitious and dangerous composition yet, to embed music in DNA.
As far as Els knew, the nonsense string would live alongside the bacterium’s historical repertoire, silently doing nothing.  Like the best conceptual art, it would sit ignored by the millions of trades going on in the marketplace all around it.  With luck, during cell division, the imposter message would replicate for a few generations, before life got wise and shed the free rider.  Or maybe it would be picked up, inspired randomness, and ride forever.
Is Els a terrorist? Did his home biology experiment literally kill people? Will he reconcile with his ex-wife and daughter? It won’t spoil it to say that Powers brings the novel to a wonderfully bizarre, Saundersesque crescendo, threading his themes together like a glorious piece of music that compels you to go back to the beginning and listen to it all again.

And you may want to start the novel over to fully appreciate the pithy commentary interspersed throughout the text, each snippet no longer than 140 characters, from the genius floating in the dark tank. Yes, Orfeo is brilliant, but please don’t let that stop you from reading it.

The streets of Boston call out for tales of explorers and settlers — especially the streets surrounding Harvard Square. Even though the cobblestones of the colonial era are now paved over, the promise of settlement and self-improvement is evident everywhere. The buildings set in copper-colored brick that manage to be both imposing and cozy and the pastoral setting within Harvard Yard carry with them the promise that education transforms environment. By entering the sacred ground of the university, you are entering a realm where books, information, can make the difference between a mediocre present and an extraordinary future. It’s interesting, therefore, with so much mythical promise in its most famous institution, that so few narratives about Harvard have ever been told from the non-elite, unassimilated experience.

Such a void is, finally and wonderfully, filled by Andre Aciman’s brilliant new novel. Harvard Squareis a novel of education and isolation, sad and funny and sure to provoke nostalgia for anyone’s college years. Though the narrative is framed in flashback, the majority of it takes place in the late 1970s, as our unnamed narrator, a Jew from Alexandria, struggles to complete his PhD in English literature at Harvard. (Aciman shares much of his narrator’s backstory.) He has already failed his graduate exams once, and though he wishes to complete his degree and become a professor in the States, he finds himself easily distracted by the lives around him, the neighbors he meets but dares not befriend, and the many beautiful young students to whom he’d never utter a word. While poring over his books at Café Algiers (a Middle-Eastern coffeehouse in Harvard Square, a real institution to both students and locals), he meets Kalaj (short for “Kalashnikov”), a hot-tempered, passionate cab driver from Tunis with a rapid-fire wit and temper, coming out in streams of French, Arabic, and English, depending on how much coffee or wine’s he’d had.

And what a figure to follow when you feel all alone: with Aciman’s florid descriptions and sharp, vivid dialogue, Kalaj quickly becomes the most compelling American cultural critic since Alex Perchov in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Kalaj criticizes everything about American culture, lambasting everyone for being “jumbo-ersatz,” all artificial, worthless, and consumed in bulk. And yet Kalaj is not a naysaying Bartleby, but rather possessing of a keen wit and a charisma that puts everyone around him to shame. The narrator is immediately drawn to Kalaj as his brother in unassimilated arms, except that Kalaj expresses himself in all the ways the narrator thinks he cannot. He may not have a degree, or even a full-time job, but he’s not a phony. “He was in-your-face; I waited till your back was turned. He stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone. I tolerated everybody without loving a single one.”

In a neighborhood of overeducated elites, Kalaj is the wise fool whose skills can’t be learned by going back to Widener library. Kalaj knows how to win arguments, find cheap booze whenever necessary, make a fun afternoon on a few dollars, and most importantly, how to bait women, to pick them as if in a game of penny poker. With Kalaj, “seduction was not pushing people into things they did not wish to do. Seduction was just keeping the pennies coming. If you ran out, then, like a magician, you twirled your fingers and pulled one out from behind her left ear and, with this touch of humor, brought laughter into the mix.” Kalaj scoffs at the lauded literary history of Massachusetts, the art of leaf peeping, the isolation of Walden Pond. He finds beauty, and pleasure, in engaging with his fellow immigrants, in debating at Café Algiers with the narrator about woman, music, wine, what makes a man a man. Café Algiers becomes, in Kalaj’s words, Chez Nous, a respite from the university just a few streets away. “It was not always easy to step out of Café Algiers after such an interlude in our imaginary Mediterranean café by the beach and walk over to Harvard,” the narrator recounts. “But, on those torrid mornings with the blinding sun in our eyes, it seemed constellations and light years away.”

And yet the narrator never gives back to his teacher Kalaj — for, like all students, the teacher is merely a footnote in the greater education. While Kalaj’s charisma drives the story, Aciman gives us almost no details about what Kalaj wants except to impart his own wisdom; we only know him by what he means to the narrator. Kalaj drives his cab around Boston, clearing enough money to keep the nights at Café Algiers going, yet he pursues nothing permanent — even after the narrator sets him up with an adjunct professor gig teaching French at Harvard, he eventually argues himself out of the position. All the while, the narrator fears being found out for clinging to Kalaj as a convenient friend, a fellow immigrant in a strange town, making “fallback fellowship in a fallback city filled with fallback lives.” The narrator switches codes constantly, between touting his Harvard pedigree to attract potential girlfriend, and committing Kalaj’s philosophies of seduction to memory. Kalaj’s curriculum cannot be reconciled with the narrator’s professional goals. After breaking up with a woman he’d just begun to love, the narrator wonders:
Why had I even started with her? To be with someone instead of no one? To be like [Kalaj]? Or had I already always been like him, but in so different a guise that it was just as easy to think us poles apart? The Arab and the Jew, the ill-tempered and the mild-mannered, the irascible and the forbearing, the this and the that. And yet, we came from the same mold, choked in the same way, and in the same way, lashed back, then ran away.
In this friendship, simpatico and yet fundamentally unequal, Aciman has built a bildungsroman on what a university education might mean: equal parts lazy-day reading on rooftops, fevered debates in crowded cafes, one-night stands and unkept promises, half-learned lessons in masculinity, both academic and anarchistic. It should be no surprise that the novel is not called “Harvard,” but instead takes its name from the slightly larger realm of the square itself, encompassing both the academy and its side alleys. And Aciman seems to understand this better than anyone: that wisdom might be sought anywhere, so long as the mind is impressionable and there are long, argumentative, passionate teachers to hold forth. I had plenty of terrific professors in college, but never one quite like Kalaj, and upon closing Harvard Square, I had to wonder if I was at fault for never seeking out the teachers whose office hours were harder to find.