The real prison is the one that Eddie Hobson, Sr.'s family
has allowed to ferment around him - why did they not insist on bringing,
repeatedly, if needed, a DOCTOR in to diagnose and treat their father and husband...?

Hobstown pretty boring.

As bewildering is why the brother and sisters insist on trying to outsmart,
trying to trick and outdo each other verbally with the same unfortunate & bizarre ways
of learning that their father had employed that pitted them against each other...
and which they hated. Their rare times of talking normally were welcome.

The portrayal of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse in the midst of all this churning
around their father's decline made an amazing subplot.

Memorable:

"And Artie swore not to budge until he proved more capable of making sense out of fragments
than his father was of fragmenting sense."

"Her father was borderline certifiable and her mother a martyr." ( )

Richard Powers is one of my favorite contemporary (hmm--should I limit this further with the modifiers "male" "American"?) authors, and Prisoner's Dilemma, his second novel, was one of only two of his novels I haven't yet read. (The other is his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

I read a fascinating interview with him in Paris Review, Winter 2002-3 which describes Powers as writing "stereoscopic" novels, which I agree is a good description. His novels often include the themes of art, music, medicine, science, artificial intelligence. His latest novel is Orfeo, which I read earlier this year, and admit to being somewhat disappointed with. It involves an avant garde composer who in his retirement is dabbling in his home laboratory with genetic modification. When he comes to the attention of Homeland Security as a potential terrorist, he goes underground. One of the concerns I had with the book was the description of the music. I was a music major in college, and have retained some familiarity with the technical aspects of music, but I found some of the terminology and descriptions too esoteric. However, I have read many reviewers who enjoyed the book. .

Back to The Prisoner's Dilemma--in which a Midwestern family falls apart. There are 4 adult children, visiting their parents due to the unnamed illness of their father, who has for years suffered from mysterious symptoms, resulting in multiple job losses (he is a history teacher), but who refuses to see a doctor. Various chapters are narrated by each of the children, and by the mother, depicting the difficult family relationships over the years. All of this is done with wit and black humor. The father's relationship with his children is one in which he engages with them in logic and philosophical puzzles, and these puzzles prominently feature in each of the children's narratives, including the eponymous "prisoner's dilemma."

Interspersed with the family narrative is a portrayal of life in the US during WW II, and particularly of the uses of propaganda, focused around Walt Disney. At first, I thought these sections of the novel were factual, but it eventually became apparent that much of this story is the product of Powers's imagination. But what an imagination!--in the narrative, Disney is part Japanese, and hugely affected by the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Disney therefore devised a scheme, approved at the highest levels of government, for the release of a vast number of the internees (a number of whom had been "creatives" at Disney Studios) to produce a propaganda film on a scale until then unknown. Ultimately, the whole propaganda film aspect of the novel is tied into the father's story.

I would recommend this novel if it sounds like a subject you'd be interested in. I don't rank it with his best, because to a certain extent I found some of his characterizations of the children a bit too "cutesy" (always ready with the witty reply), but overall very moving, and I learned a lot from it. ( )

Whenever someone asks me why I bother to care so much about the Big Picture, when all it does is upset me and there’s little that I can really do to change it, I never seem to have a good answer for them. I just do, I just have to.Well, this book is shaping up to be that answer, or at least as close to one that I can get. It’s about the moral individual and modernity and what one person can hope to accomplish against the tide of history. It’s also about media both as a narcotic agent against those anxieties, and as a possible tool to wield against them. Plus, it’s a deeply moving story of a quirky family set against the backdrop of 50 years of US history. ( )