Powers has not wholly solved the problem of writing about music without resort to technical language. To be fair, it is probably insoluble. The novel's evocations of musical pleasure will work best for readers who understand what, for example, suspensions or "strident minor sixths" are; but a lot of the musical description accomplishes impressively imagistic things with the most familiar possible terminology: names of instruments, "crescendo", the kinds of spatial metaphor with which music is always already riddled. ("The sopranos chase each other up a cosmic staircase, driven higher by the lurching vibraphones.") Cleverly, Powers makes sure to use as many vocal analogies as possible, since everybody knows what the human voice does: its verbs are as familiar to Lady Gaga fans as to creators of squeaky-door opera.

[...]

Very often, this novel makes you want to scurry to CD player or iPod to listen along. In that infectious enthusiasm, Orfeo is the equivalent in fiction of Alex Ross's history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise. But whereas Ross's book fades out in the fragmentary soundscape of our day, Powers supplies a galloping finale that is sweet, funny, sad and haunting all at once, and comes to a halt on the edge of a precipice. The rest is silence.

Richard Powers talks about his novel Orfeo, which tells the story of a composer's home microbiology lab, the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns, has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. He becomes fugitive after the police raid his home, and an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, referring to him as the "Bioterrorist Bach."

Listen to interview with the author on WNYC website:

And with all this excitement around music, in this retelling of the Orpheus myth Powers also manages enchantment—or, re-enchantment, if you, like so many of us, believe the world today needs that. Told largely as retrospection even as the story moves forward—“walking backward into the future,” as Els experiences it—Orfeo reveals how a life, and the narrative of a life, accumulates, impossibly, infinitely, from every direction. On the one hand, the fleeing Els, like Orpheus, cannot help but look back. And as with Orpheus, there must be consequences for his looking. But in a book about music, and with Powers a whole career about music, it’s no surprise when Els eventually says, “Seeing is overrated.” We see in one direction. We cannot see God and go on living.

These characters are not free of the flaws Powers is often taxed with. They can be clunkily sentimental; they descend to cliché (“We had energy. We had ideas”); their motives are sometimes conventional, sometimes obscure. Nor is the patented lyricism of Powers’s writing always effective. For every happy hit (“The predawn sky was beginning to peach”), there’s a wince-maker like “skirting a cairn of cat turd”