[LeClair is an American writer and educator. In the following review of Prisoner's Dilemma, he states that "Powers is the most accomplished practitioner" of what he calls "the 'systems novel,' a fiction that uses postmodern techniques to model the dense and tangled relations of modern history, politics, and science."]

Too few words have been written by and too many about the carved-down school of fiction, 1980s minimalism. Richard Powers's second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma, offers an excellent occasion to identify those novelists first publishing in the decade who fill the gaps the minimalists leave in their fiction and in our literary environment. Among writers such as John Calvin Batchelor (The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica), Ron Loewinsohn (Magnetic Field(s), Where All the Ladders Start), Ted Mooney (Easy Travel to Other Planets), Kathryn Kramer (A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space), and William Vollmann (You Bright and Risen Angels), Powers is the most accomplished practitioner of what I call the "systems novel," a fiction that uses postmodern techniques to model the dense and tangled relations of modern history, politics, and science.

William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, and John Barth originated the systems novel in the 1970s with what Barth termed "maximal" books, difficult information-retrieval novels that envisioned huge ecological and cultural wholes. Minimalists, perhaps in response, turned to small personal parts. I present this two-sentence history of two decades because Powers's subject in Prisoner's Dilemma and in his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, is cultural scale—modern history as a "rift torn between big and little," the massive and the minute. His achievement in both novels is building a place, as he puts it in Prisoner's Dilemma, "where little can trickle into big," where the personal becomes historical.

Powers and the other young system novelists recognize, I think, the dinosaurian demands on diminishing literacy that the maximalists imposed. Powers adapts, makes his novels both large and accessible, formally interesting and profoundly informed, composed and urgent. He creates richly specified little people whose lives trickle into the large motions of history. He connects family plots with the geopolitics of two world wars. And he demonstrates how everyday technologies (photography, movies, computers) and esoteric scientific theories have magnified the scale of contemporary history and politics. Powers's knowledge of "two cultures" and more gives him, along with the other systems novelists, purchase on the future and power over readers who may have thought that less was more.

The best metaphor for Powers's range and purpose is what he calls the "Butterfly Effect, that model of random motion describing how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking propagates an unpredictable chain reaction of air currents, ultimately altering tomorrow's weather in Duluth." This figurative butterfly was discovered by Edward Lorenz and is explained by James Gleick in his recent book Chaos, an introduction to the new science of chaos that uncovers implausible orders in random events, finds often beautiful patterns among minute particulars, and generates new relations between the far and the near.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (which was nominated for a fiction award by the National Book Critics Circle and won a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation) is a remarkable work of historical reconstruction, butterflying out from the lives of three European peasants on the eve of World War I to make connections with the larger world and with us, an ocean and decades away. Prisoner's Dilemma is a better novel, more mature and assured, more in control of the narrative frames that Powers employs for his butterfly effect. It is also a more passionate book. A hybrid of Updike's elegiac The Centaur and Barthelme's suspicious The Dead Father, Prisoner's Dilemma revolves around a dying father, a man shrinking in physical size and growing in influence. Edward Hobson—52-year-old former schoolteacher, husband, father of four children, wanderer and collector of information—resembles, Powers quite explicitly suggests late in the novel, his own father, the man who is photographed with his children on the dust jacket.

Prisoner's Dilemma opens with a lyrical and immediately engaging flashback that introduces Hobson's and Powers's scale of interests. Hobson points a weak flashlight into the cold night sky, identifying constellations for his small children and reminding them of the huge spaces between the stars, a strategy of both giving and taking away knowledge that characterizes his life and death. The present of the novel is late 1978. Edward's recurring fainting spells have worsened, and two of his children—Artie, a 25-year-old law student, and Rachel, a 23-year-old actuary—have come home to DeKalb to see him, their mother, and two children still living at home, the just-divorced Lily and high school senior Eddie. During this weekend visit and a Christmas reunion in Chicago, the family tries to decide what to do about Edward's health.

From the Hobsons' response to this common crisis, Powers evolves a subtle plot of sibling and generational conflicts. Its events, like most of our actions, are communications, messages sent and unsent through the Hobson loop. The characters are both ordinary and memorable as Powers delicately manages to make Edward's wife and children individuals and "prisoners," free persons and products of Edward's large influence. The children, like their seemingly simple mother and seemingly complex father, begin as pairs. But as the novel progresses, serious Artie and frivolous Rachel, depressed Lily and happy-go-lucky Eddie exchange qualities, turn into one another, turn into other Hobson pairs, and form by the novel's end a dense Venn diagram of Hobson—and American—family life. Readers accustomed to minimalist mumblers may find the Hobson children an old-fashioned set of talkers and doers, but in fact they are an American family Robinson, marooned by their father's attempt to head a family that can simultaneously exist in and resist Mediamerica.

Edward Hobson, a man often absent to his family when physically present and always in mind when away, appears in three alternating frames: in the 1978 chapters (which constitute about half the novel), in his children's recorded memories of him, and in his tape recordings about "Hobstown," his imaginary community that reveals how history, politics, and science brushed their butterfly wings on Edward over the course of his life. Imbued with the 1939 World's Fair faith in the future, Edward is traumatized by the randomness of survival—stunned by his only brother's death in a stateside military accident and his own accidental presence at Alamogordo when the atomic bomb was tested, an event that, in Powers's imagination, turned the wide and varied world into a single prison.

After the war, Edward attempts to live in and change what he calls, under the influence of Walt Disney, "World World," the pleasure prison of entertainment America constructed to counter global facts. As "the last generalist," Edward instructs his high school students in "big picture" history and uncovers the secrets of America's past, including the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. Frustrated by school boards, Edward makes his family his project, withdrawing from success to make his kids achievers, requiring them "to know everything" and illustrating the hopelessness of such knowledge. Emerging from the young Hobsons' memories is a tortured man who feels the world is "already lost" and yet tries to love it, who loves his little family but loses himself in imagined Hobstown.

Teaching the young not to be taught—that is Edward's paradoxical effect. In Three Farmers Powers advances the theory of cultural "trigger points," paradoxical events that occur "when the way a process develops loops back on the process and applies itself to its own source." Gödel's metamathematics, proving the incompleteness of any mathematics—including Gödel's—is one of Powers's examples. Hobson is a trigger personality, a father who proves to his children that he is not needed and thereby, in Powers's paradox, proves that his lesson of fatherly obsolescence is needed. Sentimental intellectual, master game-player, self-canceling authority, jailer and jail-house lawyer, Hobson is the most fascinating and imprisoning character I've met and not met (see his effect?) in years.

A former computer programmer and a student, it seems clear, of Douglas Hofstadter's dizzying recursions in Gödel, Escher, Bach, Powers takes his title from a game theory problem Edward presents one morning to his children. The problem posits two players in a mutually threatening situation. Their dilemma is whether to trust or to betray each other. The Hobson children see themselves as prisoners of a parallel dilemma as they confront their father's declining health: Should they trust him to eventually accept it or betray his independence?

As the novel progresses, the children discover on their own and learn from their father ways around what Powers identifies as a "Hobson's choice," the all of trust or the nothing of betrayal. Powers's butterfly accomplishment is connecting this family's dilemma with the global Hobson's choice of mutual assured destruction and with the Hobson children's responses to American culture. Will they choose the all of mass entertainment, consensus politics, and technological fantasies? The nothing of nonparticipation? Some compromise or alternative? These questions Powers leaves open at the novel's end.

"Crackpot Realism" is how the oldest Hobson child describes his response to the prisoner's dilemma, his trust in the paradoxical and unreasonable. The crackpot with his crazy theories of, say, chaos may just give us metasolutions to apparently binding realities. Powers is as informed about realities as Hobson could ask, and he has a crackpot imagination to rise above them and let us look back at our often imprisoning common sense. If he's not as artful a maker of sentences as some of his systems-novel colleagues, and even though he chooses to give Prisoner's Dilemma an unnecessarily plotted ending, Richard Powers is in 1988—like Thomas Pynchon with his historical V. and his political Crying of Lot 49 in 1966—a major American novelist.