"Understanding Richard Powers presents an introduction to one of the most important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. Joseph Dewey guides readers through Powers's combination of lexical virtuosity and structural daring - typical of the postmodernists - and the novelist's concern with the profound and humane dilemmas surrounding love and death characteristic of the late-twentieth-century realists. Dewey contends that while Powers's novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson - the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination."--BOOK JACKET.