SOURCE: "Lost in the Strands of Time," in Book World—The Washington Post, Vol. XXI, No. 34, August 25, 1991, p. 5.

In the following review, Suplee offers a positive assessment of The Gold Bug Variations.

This enormous book [The Gold Bug Variations] may be the most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow. That it succeeds on its own intricate intellectual terms (which will not be every reader's) is a considerable triumph; that it also functions as an invitingly readable story is an outright marvel.

Or, rather, two stories: Richard Powers's third novel is a narrative double-helix of interwoven tales. One, set in the late 1950s, follows Stuart Ressler, a celebrated young biologist who has a good shot at cracking the then-still-mysterious genetic code. The other takes place nearly 30 years later, in the novel's present, as a New York librarian named Jan O'Deigh and her boyfriend Franklin Todd discover Ressler, now...