Generosity:
An Enhancement
by Richard Powers
$25.00 List Price
An international student is pleased that her professor doesn’t consider himself religious. “Good,” the young woman responds. “I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa.”
Richard Powers always has a lot going on, but he’s never had a vehicle so jam-packed as Generosity: An Enhancement. This student’s rapid-fire border-hopping suits the novelist’s latest, his closest brush with comedy. Not that either the young woman or the book she inhabits lacks for tragedy. Thassadit Amzwar, twenty-three years old, has lost both parents. She herself barely survived the postcolonial “Time of Horrors” in Algiers. Yet even that grim story eventually goes through an “enhancement,” as every element of this narrative gets reconfigured. Amzwar crosses paths with
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