SOURCE: "Hobson's Last Tape," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4490, April 21-27, 1989, p. 436.

In the following excerpt, Sutherland offers a negative assessment of Prisoner's Dilemma.

There is great reach in Prisoner's Dilemma, but little grasp. Like his first, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance … Richard Powers's second novel aims to create a poetics of history for an entire era; but in neither book has he fully managed to get his material into shape. The grand gestures of both are, therefore, oddly smudged. For all its stoutness, Prisoner's Dilemma seems a frail and lethargic vehicle for the task it addresses.

That task is nothing less than sorting out the implications of the Second World War. The scene is De Kalb, Illinois, in 1978, where the four children of Eddie Hobson have foregathered to witness the last stages of his fight against the falling sickness which has plagued him...