Richard Powers: Confessions of a geek

When Richard Powers turned from programmer to novelist, he just couldn't leave science behind. John Freeman talks to the winner of the National Book Award

Arriving at the National Book Award ceremony in New York last month, Richard Powers made a nerve-wracking discovery. He had left his finalist's medal at the hotel. "I really should go back and get this thing," said Powers, looking around nervously as he entered the grand ballroom of the Marriott Marquis hotel. Seeing the throng of editors and writers, he bolted back to his room.

As it turned out, Powers' hunch was right. His ninth novel, The Echo Maker, beat out Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions and three other books to take home the prize - the same award, incidentally, that anointed Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It amounts to a powerful boost in prestige and sales, and one could have forgiven Powers for being sceptical about his chances. After all, in America, as Powers's reputation has grown, he has remained the perennial also-ran in the awards sweepstakes. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award once before, and has travelled to the National Book Critics Circle Awards four times and come home empty-handed.

"I have been luckier than any novelist," Powers says sheepishly in his suite at the Algonquin Hotel, an hour before the awards. The room is quite small, and Powers is very tall. In black-tie, with his attentive eyes and large, full, head of hair, he appears like a well-dressed Gulliver who would rather be out of doors. "All the way back to my first books, the critical recognition has always been there," he says. "As the writers of my generation have come into our forties, I think there is an increasing comfort of readers to recognise that technology is not 'out there' - it's inside us."

Powers is referring to the stumbling block some readers have had with his work - its braininess. Over the past two decades, he has stuffed his novels with an enormous amount of information, about DNA (The Gold Bug Variations), virtual reality (Plowing the Dark), medicine (Operation Wandering Soul), the rise of capitalism (Gain), computers (Galatea 2.2) and singing (The Time of Our Singing), among other things. "He gets 'brainy', and earns it," wrote the novelist Colson Whitehead in a New York Times book review, for writing about "the intricacies of Watson and Crick, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the ins and outs of making a good bar of soap. 'Chilly' comes from people who think he can be remote at times."

Neither of these charges have been levelled at The Echo Maker, however, which critics have described as Powers's most mysterious, heartfelt and heart-pounding novel yet. The novel begins with a car crash in the middle of the night on a Nebraska road. Twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schlucter emerges from the wreck in a coma - and later awakens suffering from a rare, real-life syndrome called Capgras. He can recognise his loved ones but doesn't believe that they are who they claim to be. Complicating matters is a note left by his bedside that reads: "GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else." As Mark tries to re-enter his life and divine the provenance of this message, his anguished sister, Karin, attempts to convince him that she is indeed his sister. Meanwhile, a neuroscientist author named Gerald Weber tries to focus on his case, but is derailed by the spectacle of the nearly half-million cranes that settle upon the Nebraska plain near the site of Mark's accident.

Powers's nephew was once in a car wreck and received a similarly mysterious note. But the moment the novel became a possibility came as Powers was driving across the Midwest on his way to visit his mother in Tucson. "It was getting on toward sunset. I was in the middle of Nebraska. And I looked out off the interstate and I saw this large, three-foot-high biped, then another. Then, as far as I could see, it was this continuous carpet of birds." Powers speaks in the rough and clipped tones of a Chicago accent, and there is something unusual about hearing him go into an extended reverie on the beauty of the birds, which Native Americans call echo-makers. "I almost drove off the road, it was such a hypnotic and fascinating sight," he continues. "I pulled off and the next town was Kearney, Nebraska. I got a hotel room for the night and started asking around, and they just laughed at me. I was the first person to stumble on this by accident. People come from all over the country to see it."

The image of this huge flock of cranes coming back every year to the same spot was in the back of Powers's mind as he began to read about Capgras syndrome. "It's the most eerie, unintuitive, impossible syndrome imaginable," says Powers, who watched many tapes of people suffering from it being interviewed. To him, it highlights a false division that has risen in how we talk about emotion. "All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain," Powers says, "and they all depend on each other to make sense."

When Powers gets excited, it's easy to see the enormously intelligent, slightly nerdy youth he must have been. Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1957, he grew up one of four children in a house animated by music. His father, a headmaster, would have guests over for musically accompanied singalongs. Powers's instrument was the cello. But he was also fascinated by the sciences. He wolfed down Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as a youngster, and later enrolled in the University of Chicago as a physics major, with an interest in technology. In his off-hours, he taught himself how to program computers - a skill that led him to his first and last day-job writing code in Boston. He had never considered writing until he saw a photograph of three farmers in a retrospective of August Sander's work. Two days later he quit his job to write their story.

As a young novelist, Powers's most powerful influences were James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, but it was coding that gave him an education in how to put a book together. "I think that discipline gave me many ways of thinking about form and structure as a fiction writer," he says. It is useful to remember that William Vollmann, who won the National Book Award last year, also began his career writing computer code. Their back-to-back wins are seen by many in New York circles as a kind of changing of the literary guard. Powers, however, believes that their rise in popularity reflects a shift in readers' acceptance of a new way of telling stories. "This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world. One of the things that Capgras really reveals is how dependent upon feeling idea is in order to be reliable at all."

One of the most convincing aspects of The Echo Maker is its portrait of the mechanics and feel of hospital life - the texture and tensions of getting better, and then not, of how research funnels into treatment and then runs into the hard wall of organic unknowability. Powers's brother is a surgeon, and the novelist spent quite a bit of time with him while writing his earlier book, Operation Wandering Soul, a fable-like tale set in a children's hospital in the near future. "The stories that we tell ourselves - we the healthy when someone near us is in danger, undergoing treatment - can be profoundly moving," Powers says.

Powers also believes that technology is a primary conduit for how we tell our stories. He wrote his previous novel The Time of Our Singing on a wireless keyboard, sending his words across space and on to the screen. The Echo Maker was composed using voice recognition software. Powers dictated the words onto the screen like a 21st-century Henry James, software as his amanuensis. "We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires," Powers says. "They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing."

Ranging far and wide across several disciplines, Powers has dedicated himself to knowing and exploring all those dreams. "Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously," he says. "So the books have been explorations, through characters, of these different ways of knowing the world: history and biology, digital computer technology." If he could only get a computer to tell him when he leaves his medals behind.

Biography: Richard Powers

Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1957, Richard Powers enrolled to study physics at the University of Illinois but soon switched to literature. After graduation, he worked as a computer programmer and technical writer in Boston, but left to write his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985). Eight others followed, including Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Galatea 2.2 (1995) and The Time of our Singing (2003). The Echo Maker (due from Heinemann in the new year), has just won the US National Book Award for fiction. He has also been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at the University of Illinois.