Galatea 2.2

Richard Power's Galatea 2.2 is a book about what it means to be a thinking being, and what it means to be one that feels. The narrator (who shares the same name as the author) is a novelist, newly returned with a fellowship to his alma mater. At the school he meets Lentz, who enlists Power's aid in an attempt to train a "neural network" computer system to be able to understand literature well enough to pass a standard undergraduate Literature exam. (Technically, to have its responses be indistinguishable from a human's, a form of the famous " Turing Test".) The narrator's recently ended 10-year romance looms large in the novel. The woman (identified only as "C") had been a student of the main character when he was a young graduate student. The book traces their romance through its earliest stages to where he follows C. to her parent's native country, the Netherlands; his helplessness and inability to communicate there later echoes in his attempt to get a computer system to comprehend. The failure of that romance casts a melancholy bleakness that runs throughout the book. There are suggestions of stirrings of emotion for both the pretty undergraduate who will compete against the computer program, and even (to an extent) for the computer program itself (which he bestows the name Helen when it has grown enough to want a self-descriptor) although the idea is never pursued to the level of foolishness. This is a highly cerebral book. It is worth the effort it takes to get through, painting a lovely (if overcast) emotional landscape, as well provoking the reader into thinking about what his or her consciousness really consists of. I recommend it very highly.

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