LIVE WIRES

By John Skow

Novelists occasionally tease readers, creditors, old lovers and future biographers by using their own name for invented characters. Generally such characters are charming rogues. This leads to bootless speculation along the lines of "Lordy, is he really that charming?" and "My word, did he really do all that crazy stuff?" A good rule is to ignore the confessional tease and assume that if it's called a novel on the title page, it's fiction.

This rule must be applied firmly in the case of Richard Powers' brilliantly imaginative new novel, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $23), a book that should go immediately to the top of the year's 10-best lists. As the title suggests, one of the novel's central themes is the bringing to life, and to independent awareness, of inert, nonhuman matter. The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complex network of computer circuitry, and the Pygmalions-there are a couple of them-are an acerbic cyber-scientist called Lentz and a becalmed writer named, sure enough, Richard Powers.

But think of him as, let's see, Ishmael. No. Fred Ishmael? Nah. But any other way lies madness, a dizzy spiraling down lunacy's drain. To wit: not far into the novel, while the real Powers is setting up the furniture of a marvelous story, the fictional Powers (who like the real one has written several respectfully received novels, including Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and The Gold Bug Variations), announces that he is finished with novel writing, nauseated to the very soul with the idea of creating another scene or character.

A personal note here: a minor reason for the imaginary Powers' revulsion is that Lentz and several colleagues cackle mercilessly over a newsmagazine's qualified praise for Operation Wandering Soul, the real and fictional author's fourth novel. This modified rapture (written in real life by this reviewer) pomposifies: "a prodigiously talented manufacturer of literary astonishments, which is not exactly the same as being a good writer, though he is that, too ... "

Well, whatever it takes. Giving up writing frees the hero to throw himself passionately into the absurdly difficult task of helping Lentz win a bet: that within a year, he can program a computer to construe any literary text at least as well as a human, 21-year-old undergraduate lit major. When he is being cynical, which is more than half the time, Lentz intends merely to stuff "the most complex and extensive neural simulator ever trained" with prepackaged, fake hermeneutics and suitably foggy lit-crit catchphrases. What he secretly hopes for is consciousness.

The fictional Powers programs the neural simulator, reads to it great chunks of literature and history, questions it and eventually is questioned by it: "What race am I? What races hate me?" The big network likes Mozart and knows "something about the Dreyfus case and the Boer War" but is ignorant of such things as "corks stuck in bottles, the surface of a liquid reflection ... wrappers and price tags, up versus down, the effects of hunger ..." The hero comes to think of the computer as female and calls it Helen.

Does he fall in love with what can never become more than a mock-up of human intelligence? Not really, though he is sickened when Lentz mischievously suggests destroying some of the network's circuits -- lobotomizing it -- to test its workings. What gives depth and resonance to Galatea 2.2 is a parallel theme of failed love, the hero's brooding account of an intense 10-year affair, now ended, with a Dutch-American woman he calls "C." At 35, midstream, he is close to drowning. He obsesses briefly about "A.," the pretty student who will take Lentz's test against the computer. She's not interested. This sad and gentle story winds down with "Powers" and "Helen" fully and separately aware of loneliness, and neither able to help the other.