Stephen Burt
The best parts of Richard Powers’s new novel sound like many of the best parts of his other ten novels, which is to say that they don’t sound like novels at all: They are lyrical, serious explications of difficult, technical, even academic subjects, with plenty of real-world examples and proper nouns—put there for readers who don’t know the subject already—along with allusions, brushed over the top like icing, for readers who do. These passages not only explain complicated phenomena—how DNA shapes life by shaping proteins (The Gold Bug Variations), how programmers create neural networks (Galatea 2.2), how corporations grow and 
Nobody, so far as I know, calls Carl Dennis a great innovator, and I would not trust anybody who did. Insofar as he has distinctive gifts—and he certainly does—they are gifts firmly opposed to great innovation, to major endeavors of any sort. It is in the minor efforts, the daily or weekly rewards and tasks that make up most of any life, that Dennis finds his métier.