I came into this one not knowing what to expect. Powers is very very uneven in my view. He's seen as a heavy hitting literary fiction author, but I've found all but one of his books (among the ones I've read, at least) to be litfic lite at best. He just seems to lack a basic sort of lyricism and um authentic humanity in his writing.

The opening sections of this one were a pleasant surprise. Here was lyricism! Here were interesting vignettes. I wasn't sure how they were all going to come together, but I was interested to see. Then I got to the big long middle section of the book in which the book's major plotlines came together, and it was utterly unsatisfying. Powers made a return here to writing largely dull prose, and the story wasn't that interesting either. Some of the bits (e.g. the tech guy) felt like bad fits for the book.

Powers returned to more of a vignette style as he resolved threads in the later parts of the book, but here the pacing felt all wrong, and little of the resolution was satisfying.

I imagine there's some design here. Maybe the book is constructed like a tree with the roots of those early vignettes feeding the trunk of the main story, which gives way to the branches and leaves of the later vignettes. If so, I dunno if it really worked. It didn't work super well for me, and I found a lot of the book to be a slog.

I think I've truly and fully admired just one of Powers's books. This was not it. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that great, and it's surely not a Pulitzer-worthy book.