In his first-published novel, Powers deals with nothing smaller than the origins of twentieth-century Modernism. The book, spawned by a haunting August Sander picture of three young Westerwald peasants gussied up for a Saturday night on the town, begins in the Netherlands as Europe hovers on the brink of World War I. The story moves through the intervening years to 1980s Boston with the story of Peter Mays, a computer editor and son of the brightest of the three peasants, also named Peter, in the Sander picture.

Powers's chief concern is with the interconnectedness of human events.

His novel seeks to demonstrate how every drop in the mainstream of history impinges on the other drops. His unnamed narrator, pausing between trains in Detroit, wanders into the Detroit Institute of Arts to pass the idle hours until his train for Boston departs. In the museum, he is...