[A German-born American, Hegi is a novelist and critic. In the following review, she discusses the characters in Prisoner's Dilemma.]

A father lies with his four children on the frozen November earth, quizzing them on the names of the constellations. They rest against his body, and he points a flashlight to the dark sky "as if the light goes all the way out to the stars themselves…. The rest is a blur, a rich, confusing picture book of too many possibilities."

In the first four pages of Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Powers's prose is sensuous, vivid and clear as he establishes the essence of the relationship between Eddie Hobson and his children. Why then is much of his novel told in language that's stilted and cumbersome?

If Mr. Powers has attempted to match his prose to the emotional development of his characters, the members of a dysfunctional family, he has taken a considerable risk. Their feelings have become numbed by years of forming protective scaffolding around the father, who extracts from them a conspiracy of silence toward his illness, which may be the result of radiation exposure at Alamogordo and whose symptoms are never identified. A history teacher, Eddie both captivates and keeps his distance from his wife and children with riddles and diverts them from addressing his illness until they can only focus on his evasion.

As in any dysfunctional family, the price of silence is exorbitant: Eddie's wife and children prop him up at the expense of their own emotional peace. Yet Eddie Hobson is not a villain. An "emaciated, fat man," he cares for his family with distracted affection, quoting Sterne, Kipling, Eliot and Frost to his children.

When they finally confront his illness and make him promise to enter a hospital, the characters begin to communicate on a deeper level. They unfold, become real. In their shared grief they are startled by the "connection between them that could reach down at leisure and destroy them." The change in the characters is reflected by language that loses much of its stiffness.

But by then Mr. Powers has given us nearly half a book with limited characters. It's not surprising when the 18-year-old Eddie Jr. describes his family to his girlfriend as "The close-to-the chest older brother. The testy, exradical big sis. Sis number two, everybody's favorite flake. The patient, long-suffering mom. All lost in orbit around the master of ceremonies."

Prisoner's Dilemma concerns itself with the same fascinating theme as Mr. Powers's first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: the impact of history on contemporary life and the predicament of the individual imprisoned by the sum of history. World War II forms the backdrop for the present lives of Eddie Hobson and his family. Geographical boundaries are closer drawn than in Mr. Powers's first novel; instead of three young men on their way to a German village dance—a metaphor for the greater dance, World War I—16-year-old Eddie carries the trauma of World War II into his adult life. He marries a compliant woman, has four children and creates a safe, fictitious world, Hobstown, which he keeps secret from his family, like his developing illness.

Dictating episodes into a tape recorder, Eddie covers Roosevelt, Stalin, the 1939 New York World's Fair, Dachau, Picasso and Mickey Mouse. In his world, Walt Disney is the real war hero, "the finest provider of escape from the confusing, opaque, overwhelming, paralyzing … times."

One of the most powerful parts of Prisoner's Dilemma is Eddie's account of the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, their forcible removal from their homes and their humiliation in the concentration camps. Eddie records their history not only as it was, but as it could have been if Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse had taken on the rescue of thousands of Japanese-Americans in a movie.

When Eddie's older son, Artie, a law student, listens to the tapes for the first time, he perceives Hobstown as a "web of bewildering invention designed for its curative power alone." Artie—flippant and cold in the early part of the novel—resents his father's need that has pulled him back to his family in De Kalb, Ill., when he should be studying his law books in Chicago.

His sister Lily has returned to her parents' home after 10 months of marriage to a man who tried to control her by threatening suicide. One of Mr. Powers's most successfully drawn characters, Lily resents her father's manipulation through illness and his "black humor as he slowly … erased himself for good from this place." She finds an odd sense of comfort in hiding inside a doll's palace, filling the building with her body.

Her older sister, Rachel, tries to adapt to her father's illness with humor and sarcasm. "Why fight the man when he is feeling so good?" Since Mr. Powers keeps explaining her character instead of letting her evolve, Rachel remains sketchy throughout the novel.

Eddie Jr. is the only one of the Hobson children who feels comfortable bringing friends home. To him his father's fits have become a tradition, though "a little more devastating every year." If the illness were real, he believes, his father would have died long ago. Ailene, his mother, is good-natured and confused. "Her husband's trail of crises brought out the best in her…. His suffering required her…. She gladly traded steady income for a cause." Though she finds the courage to ask her husband to enter a hospital, she is so self-deprecating that she comes close to being a stereotype.

Mr. Powers, whose first novel was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, explores an interesting theory of time in both novels. Time does not happen sequentially but exists all at once—past, present, future—in layers, a concept like the one developed by Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha. This complex treatment of time makes history the most significant character in Mr. Powers's new novel. Despite its uneven prose, Prisoner's Dilemma gives an absorbing view of history, "that most abstract, detached, impersonal, and curatorial of disciplines."