"I would love my books to seem like Mondrian at thirty meters, and then like Jackson Pollock at thirty centimetres. From far away, they may seem as if they are kinds of crystalline perfections dominated by an architectonic sense, but then you get closer and start to see the peculiarities, the fractal breaking, and the rippling of these structures. The protagonists in the stories, who are searching for a view of the world, find that the telescope is somehow pointed back upon them, and the knowledge that they succeed in acquiring is always situated, always contingent and qualified, and far messier than they ever anticipated. Ideally, these books leave their readers tinged with that nervousness of thinking, “This is an essay, a clean worldview that I am gradually closing in on.” But there comes some moment in the story where the decisions, the character interaction, or the milieu shifts into an unexpected place, and the turbulence inside of the order is revealed. I want the narrative development to pull the rug out from underneath the reader’s feet. The reader, who has been thinking up until this moment that he was reading one kind of book, now needs to completely reassemble all theories he had about what kind of book he is reading."
– Richard Powers
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