SOURCE: "Bach Would've Liked This Molecule," in The New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1991, pp. 9-10.

Jones is an American novelist whose works include Ordinary Money (1990). In the following review, he faults the numerous puns and slightness of characterization in The Gold Bug Variations, but states that the work "is a dense, symmetrical symphony in which no note goes unsounded."

In his third novel, Richard Powers is up to something very unusual. The Gold Bug Variations is a little bit like Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in that it carries us on a cerebral quest for a philosophical heffalump; it's a little bit Borgesian in its love of the complex and cryptic; it's a little bit Joycean in its size and difficulty. It's a "science" novel, but closer to science fiction in its inventiveness, its hardware vocabulary and software characterization, and in the uncritical...