SOURCE: "Pygmalion in the Computer Lab," in The New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1995, p. 17.

In the positive review below, Cohen discusses the major themes in Galatea 2.2.

It should come as no surprise that writers make lousy company. All those hours alone at the desk, fretting over words—and for what? The very medium they've chosen to connect themselves to the lived life of the planet also serves to detach them from it. And so they wind up feeling like the ape that inspired Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, who, after months of coaxing, managed to produce the first drawing by an animal: "This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

Why this should be so—why words should prove so heartbreakingly clumsy and inadequate when asked to perform what is after all their primary function, communication—is one of many urgent subjects explored in Richard Powers's fifth...