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Prisoner's Dilemma
Eddie Hobson is quickly succumbing to a mysterious illness, and his children draw on the World War II veteran's dictaphone-recorded construction of an imaginary utopia for clues to their father's illness
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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1657 people want to read
About the author
Richard Powers
91 books6,623 followersRichard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
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December 17, 2017
Three Levels of the Infinite
Richard Powers’ second novel can be read and enjoyed at three different levels of abstraction:
First, as a family drama.
Second, as an example of the game theory concept of a prisoner’s dilemma in the social context of World War II.
Third, as a contemplation of man’s position and role in the cosmos.
THE HOBSON FAMILY
Eddie Hobson Sr. is a retired history teacher and war veteran who serviced army planes in Texas during the war. He and his wife Ailene have four children, the four Hobson baby-boomers:
Arthur (Artie) 25
Lily 24
Rachel (Rach) 23
Edward (Eddie Jr.) 18
Much commentary describes this family as dysfunctional. However, I would call it more eccentric. Pop educates his kids with Socratic questions and riddles. They acquire his sense of humour and approach to life:
“The five of us are fluent, native speakers of the condensed sign language, the secret code of family.
“He [Pop] kidded and ridiculed; he was deadly earnest. He got to the heart of the urgency, only to slide off into sarcasm. He threw away lines that distilled everything he knew. And when survival itself was at issue, Dad uncorked a cliche that meant nothing and everything all at once. His voice showed that he knew he couldn’t get away with it. Yet he always did. ‘We always let him,’ Lily said out loud to the empty street. ‘At least the we I saw did.’”
When the Door is Ajar
For all this play-acting, the kids are worried about Pop. Why is he fainting and having fits?
“I will ask what remains of my family how a person could move through life repeating, every year, the old perennials, the same chestnut riddles, the adored ore, the when-is-a-door-not-a-door? Then I will tell them, straight out, the answer, the treaty: when his mind is an evasive urgency. And ajar.”
Artie, the oldest kid and a law student, is trying to get to know his father in the last days before he [Pop] dies. Pop is a mystery, a riddle, a Sphinx in his own right. His kids only partly know him, and to this extent, they only partly know themselves and each other. Pop is a conduit into both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, not to mention the universe.
SOCIETY AT WAR
Pop’s role in the war confronts him with a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisone...
This dilemma illustrates an ethical problem, in which one person/prisoner must make a decision based on what they think the other person/prisoner will do. They can either remain silent or betray the other prisoner (their accomplice). They can defect or cooperate.
When this dilemma is played out over a number of successive iterations, the question is whether behaviour tends towards “tit for tat”.
If you do good in the expectation that the other person will reciprocate (but they don’t), the next time you mightn’t trust them, in which case you will retaliate and do bad. In other words, you will be tempted to go tit for tat:
"...oddly, irrationally, we held to the boy’s hypothetical: if you, being hated, do not give way to hating."
This dilemma confronted the United States at various times during the war: after Pearl Harbour and in the lead-up to the use of the A-bomb:
"The only logic was the logic of the combined payoff. The only reasonable choice was not the choice of reason but the choice that kept both out of the hole."
The Hobstown Tapes
Pop’s proximity to the A-bomb decision made him personalise responsibility and guilt for it. This prompted him to create a fictive world (Hobstown) on audiotape, where he could work out the issues more thoroughly and empathetically.
“[Pop] periodically removed himself from here to build this other place, the last monastic in the age of community...Hobstown was his hermitage, reliquary, shrine, his chapel to the virtues of doing without...
“Somehow, Dad had fixed on the crazy notion that he was caretaker for the entire tribe, assuming personal responsibility and guilt for all the imprisoning of innocents the group continually commits. His story was the attempt to answer the question, unbearable, of how he could go on living while another suffered even the smallest indignity of distrust.”
Paradoxically, this exercise in empathy removed him from closer contact with his family and community, which exacerbated his illness:
“My father is lost, cut off from mankind, doomed to an idea. But, strange to say, the idea is compassion.”
Artie’s quest to know his father must battle in time against Pop’s deteriorating health:
“My father has fallen away. He is fallen into nothing. For a fossil record he leaves only a few fragmentary tapes, the record of his voice straying over and exploring his one idea, a notion that cut him adrift in the world for a while and failed to show him the way back home. He leaves little else: A favourite chair that holds his impression. A closet of shirts that still wrinkle where he hunched. A few photos. Some freehand lecture notes. And the five of us, of course. The sum total of his lessons.”
THE COSMOS
In a way, Hobstown is a miniature of the wider world, or a microcosm of the macrocosm. In it, Pop tries to portray and represent the infinite in terms of the finite. He is looking for the big picture in the little picture.
“He wants to undo what was done to him out in the desert, during his tour of duty. He wants to understand the incomprehensible climax of the present, the cathedral of justifiable injustice he has only read about, never felt. Already people talk about the last necessary evil as if it is fairy tale. He wants to see if big is the sum of little, or if the two belong to unjoinable worlds. He wants to see if he can keep his head while all about are losing theirs and blaming it on him.”
Artie recognises what was really happening in Hobstown:
“Pop’s land, it became increasingly clear, however rooted in fact, branched into a web of bewildering invention designed for its curative power alone. The story of Hobstown, so far as Artie could make it out from the Byzantine and baffling shifts of events, traced out Dad’s favourite hobby horse of all: how we are invariably trapped by immediate concerns into missing the long run, the big picture.”
The big picture that is the cosmos is anticipated in the very first paragraph and pages of the novel, where Pop and the kids are lying on the ground, looking up at the night sky:
“Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations...My father is doing what he does best, doing the only thing he knew how to do in this life. He is quizzing us, plaguing his kids with questions. Where is the belt of Orion? What is the English for Ursa Major? Who knows the story behind the Twins? How big is a magnitude?...He talks to us only in riddles. We climb out of the crib and learn to speak: he warns us about language with ‘When is a door not a door?’ We grow, we discover the neighbourhood. He is there, quizzing us on the points of the compass. We fall, we bruise ourselves. He makes the wound a lesson on the capillaries. Tonight we learn, in the great square of Pegasus, how far things are from one another. How alone.”
"...even if we can’t see the images of myth, all of us, even my little brother, can hear in my father's quizzes the main reason for his taking us out under the winter lights: ‘If there’s one thing the universe excels at, it’s empty space.’ We are out here alone, on a sliver of rock under the black vacuum, with nothing but his riddles for our thin atmosphere. He seems to tell us that the more we know, the less we can be hurt. But he leaves the all-important corollary, the how-to-get-there, up to us, the students, as an exercise...
“My father, the last generalist, who has always instructed me that one should attempt, hopelessly, to know everything, never once tells me, point blank, why trying to know left him so fiercely alone and lost.”
"A Script of the Greater Epic Writ Little"
In language that recalls both Thomas Pynchon, and William Blake’s verse “To see a World in a grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour”, Artie says:
“My brother passes; the football parabolas toward me. I reach for it, full extension, and at once understand what the man’s [Pop's] real question had been all along. Inside each of us is a script of the greater epic writ little, an atlas of politics so abundant it threatens to fill us to breaking. My father asks how we might find our way through all of that to a treaty.”
Cosmo-Fiction
At these three levels, then, Richard Powers is investigating aspects of the cosmology of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology
To the extent that he deals with the role of the individual consciousness or being within the cosmos, it is metaphysical or philosophical cosmology.
The mathematics and science involved in Powers’ fiction doesn’t have to be construed as a little picture preoccupation with systems in their own right, but can be construed as tools which may be used to investigate the big picture of cosmology.
"The Single Burden"
Powers is sceptical about the efficacy of reason and logic in this quest. They might not be adequate to understand our place in the cosmos. Something else might be needed, though Powers doesn't expressly suggest it might be faith of some sort. Pop says:
"The one value I try to instil in you two over the years - the single burden I place on you - is to try to be a little sceptical, a tiny bit rational about what you believe...
"Don’t worry about your major. Don’t worry about grades. A gentleman passes with C’s. Just try to figure out where history has set you down..."
"Pop always insisted that one’s only hope of salvation lay in finding out where history dropped you down."
Artie tries to determine what else is required to comprehend our place. Are the apparently conflicting reason and emotion enough?
"I always thought that intellect and sentiment formed the horns of an exclusive either-or. They do not. My father had them both in doses that he, as well as the rest of us, paid for healthily."
Thus, it can be argued that Powers, like Don DeLillo in “Ratner’s Star”, is writing not so much Systems Novels, but what you could call cosmological novels or cosmo-fiction.
"This Complicated and Terrifying Web"
“The novelist knows that our stories about nature are stories about ourselves. He can explicitly focalize the anxieties, the narratives, the hopes, the fears, and the dreams that bind us together in this complicated and terrifying web.”
Richard Powers in Conversation with Tom LeClair and Scott Hermanson
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...
SOUNDTRACK:
May 23, 2017
Richard Powers’ second novel can be read and enjoyed at three different levels of abstraction:
First, as a family drama.
Second, as an example of the game theory concept of a prisoner’s dilemma in the social context of World War II.
Third, as a contemplation of man’s position and role in the cosmos.
THE HOBSON FAMILY
Eddie Hobson Sr. is a retired history teacher and war veteran who serviced army planes in Texas during the war. He and his wife Ailene have four children, the four Hobson baby-boomers:
Arthur (Artie) 25
Lily 24
Rachel (Rach) 23
Edward (Eddie Jr.) 18
Much commentary describes this family as dysfunctional. However, I would call it more eccentric. Pop educates his kids with Socratic questions and riddles. They acquire his sense of humour and approach to life:
“The five of us are fluent, native speakers of the condensed sign language, the secret code of family.
“He [Pop] kidded and ridiculed; he was deadly earnest. He got to the heart of the urgency, only to slide off into sarcasm. He threw away lines that distilled everything he knew. And when survival itself was at issue, Dad uncorked a cliche that meant nothing and everything all at once. His voice showed that he knew he couldn’t get away with it. Yet he always did. ‘We always let him,’ Lily said out loud to the empty street. ‘At least the we I saw did.’”
When the Door is Ajar
For all this play-acting, the kids are worried about Pop. Why is he fainting and having fits?
“I will ask what remains of my family how a person could move through life repeating, every year, the old perennials, the same chestnut riddles, the adored ore, the when-is-a-door-not-a-door? Then I will tell them, straight out, the answer, the treaty: when his mind is an evasive urgency. And ajar.”
Artie, the oldest kid and a law student, is trying to get to know his father in the last days before he [Pop] dies. Pop is a mystery, a riddle, a Sphinx in his own right. His kids only partly know him, and to this extent, they only partly know themselves and each other. Pop is a conduit into both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, not to mention the universe.
SOCIETY AT WAR
Pop’s role in the war confronts him with a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisone...
This dilemma illustrates an ethical problem, in which one person/prisoner must make a decision based on what they think the other person/prisoner will do. They can either remain silent or betray the other prisoner (their accomplice). They can defect or cooperate.
When this dilemma is played out over a number of successive iterations, the question is whether behaviour tends towards “tit for tat”.
If you do good in the expectation that the other person will reciprocate (but they don’t), the next time you mightn’t trust them, in which case you will retaliate and do bad. In other words, you will be tempted to go tit for tat:
"...oddly, irrationally, we held to the boy’s hypothetical: if you, being hated, do not give way to hating."
This dilemma confronted the United States at various times during the war: after Pearl Harbour and in the lead-up to the use of the A-bomb:
"The only logic was the logic of the combined payoff. The only reasonable choice was not the choice of reason but the choice that kept both out of the hole."
The Hobstown Tapes
Pop’s proximity to the A-bomb decision made him personalise responsibility and guilt for it. This prompted him to create a fictive world (Hobstown) on audiotape, where he could work out the issues more thoroughly and empathetically.
“[Pop] periodically removed himself from here to build this other place, the last monastic in the age of community...Hobstown was his hermitage, reliquary, shrine, his chapel to the virtues of doing without...
“Somehow, Dad had fixed on the crazy notion that he was caretaker for the entire tribe, assuming personal responsibility and guilt for all the imprisoning of innocents the group continually commits. His story was the attempt to answer the question, unbearable, of how he could go on living while another suffered even the smallest indignity of distrust.”
Paradoxically, this exercise in empathy removed him from closer contact with his family and community, which exacerbated his illness:
“My father is lost, cut off from mankind, doomed to an idea. But, strange to say, the idea is compassion.”
Artie’s quest to know his father must battle in time against Pop’s deteriorating health:
“My father has fallen away. He is fallen into nothing. For a fossil record he leaves only a few fragmentary tapes, the record of his voice straying over and exploring his one idea, a notion that cut him adrift in the world for a while and failed to show him the way back home. He leaves little else: A favourite chair that holds his impression. A closet of shirts that still wrinkle where he hunched. A few photos. Some freehand lecture notes. And the five of us, of course. The sum total of his lessons.”
THE COSMOS
In a way, Hobstown is a miniature of the wider world, or a microcosm of the macrocosm. In it, Pop tries to portray and represent the infinite in terms of the finite. He is looking for the big picture in the little picture.
“He wants to undo what was done to him out in the desert, during his tour of duty. He wants to understand the incomprehensible climax of the present, the cathedral of justifiable injustice he has only read about, never felt. Already people talk about the last necessary evil as if it is fairy tale. He wants to see if big is the sum of little, or if the two belong to unjoinable worlds. He wants to see if he can keep his head while all about are losing theirs and blaming it on him.”
Artie recognises what was really happening in Hobstown:
“Pop’s land, it became increasingly clear, however rooted in fact, branched into a web of bewildering invention designed for its curative power alone. The story of Hobstown, so far as Artie could make it out from the Byzantine and baffling shifts of events, traced out Dad’s favourite hobby horse of all: how we are invariably trapped by immediate concerns into missing the long run, the big picture.”
The big picture that is the cosmos is anticipated in the very first paragraph and pages of the novel, where Pop and the kids are lying on the ground, looking up at the night sky:
“Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations...My father is doing what he does best, doing the only thing he knew how to do in this life. He is quizzing us, plaguing his kids with questions. Where is the belt of Orion? What is the English for Ursa Major? Who knows the story behind the Twins? How big is a magnitude?...He talks to us only in riddles. We climb out of the crib and learn to speak: he warns us about language with ‘When is a door not a door?’ We grow, we discover the neighbourhood. He is there, quizzing us on the points of the compass. We fall, we bruise ourselves. He makes the wound a lesson on the capillaries. Tonight we learn, in the great square of Pegasus, how far things are from one another. How alone.”
"...even if we can’t see the images of myth, all of us, even my little brother, can hear in my father's quizzes the main reason for his taking us out under the winter lights: ‘If there’s one thing the universe excels at, it’s empty space.’ We are out here alone, on a sliver of rock under the black vacuum, with nothing but his riddles for our thin atmosphere. He seems to tell us that the more we know, the less we can be hurt. But he leaves the all-important corollary, the how-to-get-there, up to us, the students, as an exercise...
“My father, the last generalist, who has always instructed me that one should attempt, hopelessly, to know everything, never once tells me, point blank, why trying to know left him so fiercely alone and lost.”
"A Script of the Greater Epic Writ Little"
In language that recalls both Thomas Pynchon, and William Blake’s verse “To see a World in a grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour”, Artie says:
“My brother passes; the football parabolas toward me. I reach for it, full extension, and at once understand what the man’s [Pop's] real question had been all along. Inside each of us is a script of the greater epic writ little, an atlas of politics so abundant it threatens to fill us to breaking. My father asks how we might find our way through all of that to a treaty.”
Cosmo-Fiction
At these three levels, then, Richard Powers is investigating aspects of the cosmology of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology
To the extent that he deals with the role of the individual consciousness or being within the cosmos, it is metaphysical or philosophical cosmology.
The mathematics and science involved in Powers’ fiction doesn’t have to be construed as a little picture preoccupation with systems in their own right, but can be construed as tools which may be used to investigate the big picture of cosmology.
"The Single Burden"
Powers is sceptical about the efficacy of reason and logic in this quest. They might not be adequate to understand our place in the cosmos. Something else might be needed, though Powers doesn't expressly suggest it might be faith of some sort. Pop says:
"The one value I try to instil in you two over the years - the single burden I place on you - is to try to be a little sceptical, a tiny bit rational about what you believe...
"Don’t worry about your major. Don’t worry about grades. A gentleman passes with C’s. Just try to figure out where history has set you down..."
"Pop always insisted that one’s only hope of salvation lay in finding out where history dropped you down."
Artie tries to determine what else is required to comprehend our place. Are the apparently conflicting reason and emotion enough?
"I always thought that intellect and sentiment formed the horns of an exclusive either-or. They do not. My father had them both in doses that he, as well as the rest of us, paid for healthily."
Thus, it can be argued that Powers, like Don DeLillo in “Ratner’s Star”, is writing not so much Systems Novels, but what you could call cosmological novels or cosmo-fiction.
"This Complicated and Terrifying Web"
“The novelist knows that our stories about nature are stories about ourselves. He can explicitly focalize the anxieties, the narratives, the hopes, the fears, and the dreams that bind us together in this complicated and terrifying web.”
Richard Powers in Conversation with Tom LeClair and Scott Hermanson
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...
SOUNDTRACK:
May 23, 2017
January 24, 2021
Il dilemma del prigioniero dice: "Che cosa farebbero 2 persone, principalmente dei criminali, prese separatamente: se tutte e due vuotano il sacco, per esempio avranno 6 anni di carcere a testa, se uno dei due collabora e l'altro no, il primo sarà salvo e l'altro avrà 7 anni. Ma se tutti e due non collaboreranno, avranno tutti e due 1 anno di carcere a testa?" Cosa faranno? Avranno ognuno fiducia nell'altro? Oppure, l'egoismo prenderà il sopravvento e...
Terzo libro letto di Powers ed entra di diritto tra i miei scrittori preferiti di sempre. Siamo a livelli altissimi di letteratura, scritto su 3 piani e tempi narrativi differenti, ma pur essendo una lettura impegnativa (che non è una nota negativa, anzi), la lettura scivola via meravigliosamente. Una scrittura molto raffinata, ricercata, a volte scorrevole, a volte poetica, a volte multiforme, multidirezionale. Insomma una narrativa che mi coinvolge sempre più che la storia entra nel vivo e qui arriviamo a parlare delle argomentazioni sviluppate: la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e tutto ciò che ne è derivato, l'America post-bellica e conseguente periodo atomico, l'America degli anni Settanta, le vicissitudini di una famiglia media con tutte le miriade di sfaccettature, una famiglia stravagante e particolare, dove ogni componente ne è caratterizzato magnificamente, la libertà primordiale... ci sarà mai?
Ennesimo capolavoro dell'autore!
Consigliatissimo!
Terzo libro letto di Powers ed entra di diritto tra i miei scrittori preferiti di sempre. Siamo a livelli altissimi di letteratura, scritto su 3 piani e tempi narrativi differenti, ma pur essendo una lettura impegnativa (che non è una nota negativa, anzi), la lettura scivola via meravigliosamente. Una scrittura molto raffinata, ricercata, a volte scorrevole, a volte poetica, a volte multiforme, multidirezionale. Insomma una narrativa che mi coinvolge sempre più che la storia entra nel vivo e qui arriviamo a parlare delle argomentazioni sviluppate: la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e tutto ciò che ne è derivato, l'America post-bellica e conseguente periodo atomico, l'America degli anni Settanta, le vicissitudini di una famiglia media con tutte le miriade di sfaccettature, una famiglia stravagante e particolare, dove ogni componente ne è caratterizzato magnificamente, la libertà primordiale... ci sarà mai?
Ennesimo capolavoro dell'autore!
Consigliatissimo!
February 25, 2021
I ordered this book back in May 2020, but due to various administrative/logistical issues at Waterstones it didn't reach me until last month. It was Powers' second novel, and completes the set for me, and though interesting and as full of ideas as ever, it is probably not the best one to start with.
Like many of his other books, it has two alternating strands which come together as the book progresses. One is a fairly simple family story in which the four children of Eddie and Ailene Hobson are brought together to try to deal with Eddie's mysterious illness, a tendemcy to faint which is getting more frequent. Eddie is an eccentric father whose inner thoughts are kept from his family, and he likes to test his children with intellectual puzzles and memory games. The four children are all strong characters in theie own right, and the focus changes by chapter between members of the family.
The second part is more complicated, and is built around a counterfactual history of the Second World War in which the young Eddie becomes involved in a Walt Disney epic building a fairytale microcosm of America, created using technicians rescued from the internment camps where civilians with Japanese roots were held. How this relates to the first strand is clarified near the end.
The whole thing is rather cleverly plotted but perhaps the young Powers' vision of the world has been overtaken by events over the last 30+ years.
Like many of his other books, it has two alternating strands which come together as the book progresses. One is a fairly simple family story in which the four children of Eddie and Ailene Hobson are brought together to try to deal with Eddie's mysterious illness, a tendemcy to faint which is getting more frequent. Eddie is an eccentric father whose inner thoughts are kept from his family, and he likes to test his children with intellectual puzzles and memory games. The four children are all strong characters in theie own right, and the focus changes by chapter between members of the family.
The second part is more complicated, and is built around a counterfactual history of the Second World War in which the young Eddie becomes involved in a Walt Disney epic building a fairytale microcosm of America, created using technicians rescued from the internment camps where civilians with Japanese roots were held. How this relates to the first strand is clarified near the end.
The whole thing is rather cleverly plotted but perhaps the young Powers' vision of the world has been overtaken by events over the last 30+ years.
December 17, 2018
In Richard Powers’ first novel (Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance), the author uses the subject of photography as a way into some of the topics he wants to discuss. And the dance that the farmers are heading to is a metaphor for the more macabre dance that was The First World War. Here, in Prisoner’s Dilemma, we get a clue about Powers’ ambitions when it becomes clear that he is using cinema (specifically Disney, but also by allusion) in place of photography: what is cinema if not a multitude of photographs combined to create a moving image? At the same time, Powers moves us from WWI to WWII, or, more correctly, the effects of WWII on individuals and on a nation (the US, but, by extension, other nations, too).
Early on in the book, we are introduced to the element of game theory that gives the book its title. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a paradox. In essence, two men are offered the option to cooperate or defect. For each of them, their path to freedom lies in betraying the other, but by doing this they risk (if the other chooses the same option) a penalty far greater than mutual cooperation would bring. But cooperation, if not reciprocated, runs the risk of the greatest penalty of all. If you stop to think about it for a while, the mutually beneficial strategy is for both men to cooperate. The dilemma, and the central idea of Powers’ novel, is the lack of trust between people that drives them to mutual betrayal (neither believes they can trust the other and neither is willing to run the risk of the highest penalty, so both choose the option with the heavier penalty but the chance of freedom).
In interleaving narratives, Powers explores this dilemma at an individual and a national/global level.
In one narrative strand, we follow the Hobson family. This choice of family name must be a deliberate reference to the saying “Hobson’s choice” which refers to a situation where a person can only choose between something or nothing. This is different to a dilemma in which a person has to choose between two undesirable options, but part of Powers’ thinking seems to be that we often think we have no real choice but that is only because we are not brave enough or trusting enough to consider the other option. Human nature is selfish, both at individual and national level (it was hard when reading all this not to think about my own country and our current battles with Brexit - it’s not stretching things too far to say we are in this mess (personal view - other opinions are available) because we acted selfishly and not in line with the greater good). Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr. but it is a mystery. His family gather round at Thanksgiving and attempt to persuade him to see a doctor. It starts off like a typical family saga and you can be forgiven for thinking the family will rally round and solve the problem and the book will end with a family Thanksgiving supper. But this is Richard Powers and things are not so simple. The four children take turns at centre stage as they seek to come to terms with their father.
In another narrative strand, we read transcriptions of Eddie’s “secret” project where he has been dictating the story of Hobstown beginning in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair and moving to the story of Disney’s propaganda films in WWII. Here, the story of Hobstown diverges from reality as two of Disney’s employees are caught up in the US’s mass incarceration of AJAs (Americans of Japanese Ancestry). This incarceration actually happened (around 110,000 people were forcibly moved to concentration camps in the wake of Pearl Harbour for no other reason than having Japanese ancestry), but Disney’s claim to Japanese ancestry which he used to blackmail the US secretary of war (who would be afraid to arrest such a prominent figure) is Eddie’s fantasy and leads a story where Disney sets up a whole new community. Once again, we are examining the Prisoner’s Dilemma as Disney seeks a way to defect from the war.
In a final, much shorter, narrative strand, one of Eddie’s children writes years later of his piecing together what had happened to his father in the war and the impact it had on his life. Is there something there, he wonders, that can explain his father's inexplicable illness?
As I am reading all of Powers’ novels in publication order (one a month for a year), it is clear to see from my recent reading of Three Farmers… how Powers is developing some of the themes that will dominate his future work. As the back of my edition of the book says: “The impact of history on contemporary life and the predicament of the individual imprisoned by the sum of history”. There is so much more that could be said about this book. As I read, I Googled the name of one of the employees taken from Disney and came across a book called “Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction” which includes a chapter on this book. This is the book description for “Outside, America”
The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn."
Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.
Whilst I am not sure I 100% understand this (and the excerpts of the book I read take a few readings to get to grips with), it is an absorbing subject. The whole of Prisoner’s Dilemma is full of ideas and parallels that are still uncannily relevant (it was first published in 1988) and which make you stop to think.
On my first reading of this (see much shorter review below), I gave this 5 stars. In a slightly contradictory move I am going to say that I got much more from this second reading, mainly due to stopping to investigate some of the things it throws up, but I am reducing my rating to 4 stars primarily because I wasn’t quite so convinced by some of the characters (Ailene, Eddie’s wife, seems particularly one-dimensional to me). Still, if you were reading Powers as he published books, rather than in retrospect as I am, I think you would be very excited about what he would produce next. And, given that I know the answer to that is The Gold Bug Variations, that excitement would be appropriate!
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ORIGINAL REVIEW
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I think I could read this book another 20 times and still not pick up on everything Powers raises. We have what seems to be the story of an American family (a slightly odd American family, it has to be said) where the father is suffering from an undiagnosed illness intertwined with a fictional take on what Walt Disney might have done during the Second World War related to the American decision to incarcerate their citizens of Japanese descent during that conflict. For most of the story, I think I was sort of envisaging a 4-star rating, although I was so engrossed in the tale I wasn't stopping to think about how I would rate it. But then, as it built towards the ending, which I would be the first to admit I didn't fully understand, I realised that it is such an amazing piece of writing I just have to give it the full 5-stars.
I don't think I should have timed finishing this book to be so close to bed time: I don't think I will sleep much tonight! It's not scary, it's just very brain-stimulating.
Early on in the book, we are introduced to the element of game theory that gives the book its title. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a paradox. In essence, two men are offered the option to cooperate or defect. For each of them, their path to freedom lies in betraying the other, but by doing this they risk (if the other chooses the same option) a penalty far greater than mutual cooperation would bring. But cooperation, if not reciprocated, runs the risk of the greatest penalty of all. If you stop to think about it for a while, the mutually beneficial strategy is for both men to cooperate. The dilemma, and the central idea of Powers’ novel, is the lack of trust between people that drives them to mutual betrayal (neither believes they can trust the other and neither is willing to run the risk of the highest penalty, so both choose the option with the heavier penalty but the chance of freedom).
In interleaving narratives, Powers explores this dilemma at an individual and a national/global level.
In one narrative strand, we follow the Hobson family. This choice of family name must be a deliberate reference to the saying “Hobson’s choice” which refers to a situation where a person can only choose between something or nothing. This is different to a dilemma in which a person has to choose between two undesirable options, but part of Powers’ thinking seems to be that we often think we have no real choice but that is only because we are not brave enough or trusting enough to consider the other option. Human nature is selfish, both at individual and national level (it was hard when reading all this not to think about my own country and our current battles with Brexit - it’s not stretching things too far to say we are in this mess (personal view - other opinions are available) because we acted selfishly and not in line with the greater good). Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr. but it is a mystery. His family gather round at Thanksgiving and attempt to persuade him to see a doctor. It starts off like a typical family saga and you can be forgiven for thinking the family will rally round and solve the problem and the book will end with a family Thanksgiving supper. But this is Richard Powers and things are not so simple. The four children take turns at centre stage as they seek to come to terms with their father.
In another narrative strand, we read transcriptions of Eddie’s “secret” project where he has been dictating the story of Hobstown beginning in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair and moving to the story of Disney’s propaganda films in WWII. Here, the story of Hobstown diverges from reality as two of Disney’s employees are caught up in the US’s mass incarceration of AJAs (Americans of Japanese Ancestry). This incarceration actually happened (around 110,000 people were forcibly moved to concentration camps in the wake of Pearl Harbour for no other reason than having Japanese ancestry), but Disney’s claim to Japanese ancestry which he used to blackmail the US secretary of war (who would be afraid to arrest such a prominent figure) is Eddie’s fantasy and leads a story where Disney sets up a whole new community. Once again, we are examining the Prisoner’s Dilemma as Disney seeks a way to defect from the war.
In a final, much shorter, narrative strand, one of Eddie’s children writes years later of his piecing together what had happened to his father in the war and the impact it had on his life. Is there something there, he wonders, that can explain his father's inexplicable illness?
As I am reading all of Powers’ novels in publication order (one a month for a year), it is clear to see from my recent reading of Three Farmers… how Powers is developing some of the themes that will dominate his future work. As the back of my edition of the book says: “The impact of history on contemporary life and the predicament of the individual imprisoned by the sum of history”. There is so much more that could be said about this book. As I read, I Googled the name of one of the employees taken from Disney and came across a book called “Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction” which includes a chapter on this book. This is the book description for “Outside, America”
The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn."
Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.
Whilst I am not sure I 100% understand this (and the excerpts of the book I read take a few readings to get to grips with), it is an absorbing subject. The whole of Prisoner’s Dilemma is full of ideas and parallels that are still uncannily relevant (it was first published in 1988) and which make you stop to think.
On my first reading of this (see much shorter review below), I gave this 5 stars. In a slightly contradictory move I am going to say that I got much more from this second reading, mainly due to stopping to investigate some of the things it throws up, but I am reducing my rating to 4 stars primarily because I wasn’t quite so convinced by some of the characters (Ailene, Eddie’s wife, seems particularly one-dimensional to me). Still, if you were reading Powers as he published books, rather than in retrospect as I am, I think you would be very excited about what he would produce next. And, given that I know the answer to that is The Gold Bug Variations, that excitement would be appropriate!
----------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
----------------
I think I could read this book another 20 times and still not pick up on everything Powers raises. We have what seems to be the story of an American family (a slightly odd American family, it has to be said) where the father is suffering from an undiagnosed illness intertwined with a fictional take on what Walt Disney might have done during the Second World War related to the American decision to incarcerate their citizens of Japanese descent during that conflict. For most of the story, I think I was sort of envisaging a 4-star rating, although I was so engrossed in the tale I wasn't stopping to think about how I would rate it. But then, as it built towards the ending, which I would be the first to admit I didn't fully understand, I realised that it is such an amazing piece of writing I just have to give it the full 5-stars.
I don't think I should have timed finishing this book to be so close to bed time: I don't think I will sleep much tonight! It's not scary, it's just very brain-stimulating.
June 19, 2007
Richard Powers is a genius. I love his books, but this one is by far my favorite. It may be a bit confusing for some, but SO worth it. I did not want this book to end. I wanted to be a part of the Hobson family, despite their difficulties. I loved his references to utopia topics like Disneyland, It's A Wonderful Life, etc . Also his references to his Illinois home, and Chicagoland locations. I used to test perspective boyfriends by giving it to them to read. I met the author in college. His was the first book that made me think that people were actually writing CLASSICS today, something worth reading for future generations. Yes, I think it's THAT good.
May 9, 2020
Questo libro è geniale: il riferimento al gioco del prigioniero nella teoria dei giochi matematici, il modo in cui questo romanzo è costruito dal punto di vista narrativo, credo abbia pesantemente determinato la mia assegnazione delle 5 stelle.
February 26, 2018
Another mindboggling Powers book. The story of a young man that is caught between the twin promises of unbridled progress (the 1939 World Fair in New York) and total annihilation (the 1945 atomic bomb). The cognitive dissonance between these opposed destinies condenses in a moral conundrum that is encapsulated by the famous Prisoner's Dilemma: do we, as a planetary society, fundamentally choose to trust one another and cooperate, even if we don't know that our stance will be reciprocated? Or do we take the path of an endless Hobbesian war of everyone against everyone else? That is the dilemma that is embodied by the mysterious life of Eddie Hobson and which late in his life he injects in the tissue that keeps his nuclear family together.
Richard Powers has the uncanny ability to mesh these kinds of deeply philosophical questions in a multi-layered tale that is almost holographic in its verisimilitude. The texture of the Hobsons' daily routine - their dreams and disappointments, pranks, language games - is pictured with such a degree of empathy and exactitude that it's almost beyond belief. I can't think of any contemporary writer who is able to capture the complexities of our present-day predicament with such brilliance and integrity. Quite simply great literature.
Richard Powers has the uncanny ability to mesh these kinds of deeply philosophical questions in a multi-layered tale that is almost holographic in its verisimilitude. The texture of the Hobsons' daily routine - their dreams and disappointments, pranks, language games - is pictured with such a degree of empathy and exactitude that it's almost beyond belief. I can't think of any contemporary writer who is able to capture the complexities of our present-day predicament with such brilliance and integrity. Quite simply great literature.
April 15, 2025
Frustrating and annoying, it ultimately got to be a real slog to get through. So disappointed.
September 27, 2025
Published in 1988, Prisoner’s Dilemma is the type of book that could be studied in a literature course. It is one of Richard Powers’ early works that blends alternate history, game theory, family psychology, and philosophy. The contemporary part of the story is about Eddie Hobson Sr. who suffers recurring fainting spells. He is not keen to get medical treatment, which worries his wife and four children. Eddie works on his own secret project called "Hobstown," recording ideas on private tapes. He regularly poses riddles and puzzles for his family to solve (one of these is the titular prisoner’s dilemma). His teaching career involves frequent job changes and relocations due to his illness and eccentric behavior. He creates many challenges and frustrations for his family, and they must decide whether to engage or protect themselves emotionally.
In addition to the contemporary story, it flashes back to Eddie’s youth just prior to and during WWII. He gets involved in a project run by Walt Disney (which is fabricated for this story). Disney uses this project to help Japanese Americans during their wartime internment. The prisoner's dilemma sets up a situation where people must choose between self-interest or cooperation for mutual benefit. Eddie’s family, in essence, is faced with a prisoner’s dilemma of their own. The Disney project sets up another prisoner’s dilemma.
The primary theme is trust. I found it particularly relevant to our current environment where trust has become such an important issue. Richard Powers is one of my favorite authors. His prose is dense and contains scientific and philosophical concepts. One of the topics he covers in many of his works is how to reconcile logic and reason with human behavior (which is very often not logical). I am in the process of reading his entire catalogue. While I slightly prefer his more recent works, this one is certainly intellectually engaging and worth reading.
In addition to the contemporary story, it flashes back to Eddie’s youth just prior to and during WWII. He gets involved in a project run by Walt Disney (which is fabricated for this story). Disney uses this project to help Japanese Americans during their wartime internment. The prisoner's dilemma sets up a situation where people must choose between self-interest or cooperation for mutual benefit. Eddie’s family, in essence, is faced with a prisoner’s dilemma of their own. The Disney project sets up another prisoner’s dilemma.
The primary theme is trust. I found it particularly relevant to our current environment where trust has become such an important issue. Richard Powers is one of my favorite authors. His prose is dense and contains scientific and philosophical concepts. One of the topics he covers in many of his works is how to reconcile logic and reason with human behavior (which is very often not logical). I am in the process of reading his entire catalogue. While I slightly prefer his more recent works, this one is certainly intellectually engaging and worth reading.
June 2, 2018
On its simplest level (and that's not very simple) this is a family drama about a somewhat idiosyncratic family. Dad is a history teacher who lost teaching jobs (while winning most beloved teacher of the year awards) either because he questioned events a bit too much or because he had an "episode" in the classroom. Mom did what all good wives in the 50's did - put herself second to her husband and then to her children. The four kids - Artie, Lucy, Rachel, and Eddie, Jr. - absorbed the style of their father, who answered questions with questions and never let his kids off easy. But Eddie, Sr. isn't well. He hasn't been for years. He has fits, he throws up, he goes catatonic. Now in his mid-sixties, the family fears he is dying. Eddie, Sr., though, doesn't ever go to the doctor but now he's agreed, so long as it is to the VA hospital. Eddie, Sr.'s response to his "illness" over the years has been to work on his Hobbstown project, which he never shares with his family. When the family has all gathered at home one weekend, as they all become more concerned about Eddie, Sr., he posits a form of the prisoner's dilemma for them to consider. This is more than just dad being dad; this is a question closely connected to what is haunting Eddie, Sr.
But then, showing up between some chapters, is the Walt Disney story, which focuses on the making of a movie that has never been seen. A movie that Walt conceived of initially as a way to aid the war (WWII) effort but then used as a means to get 10,000 Japanese-Americans out of internment camps. The movie, starring Eddie, Sr. as a replacement for Bud Middleton of the 1939 World's Fair fame, has a young man, inspired by the World's Fair's World of Tomorrow and its time capsule, caught up in the war effort and pulled out of disappointments by Mickey Mouse, who shows him dazzling scenes of the future, at least for awhile. Is this the Hobbstown Project?
And intertwined in all of this are questions that seem to designed to assist in the consideration of the prisoner's dilemma.
Great book.
But then, showing up between some chapters, is the Walt Disney story, which focuses on the making of a movie that has never been seen. A movie that Walt conceived of initially as a way to aid the war (WWII) effort but then used as a means to get 10,000 Japanese-Americans out of internment camps. The movie, starring Eddie, Sr. as a replacement for Bud Middleton of the 1939 World's Fair fame, has a young man, inspired by the World's Fair's World of Tomorrow and its time capsule, caught up in the war effort and pulled out of disappointments by Mickey Mouse, who shows him dazzling scenes of the future, at least for awhile. Is this the Hobbstown Project?
And intertwined in all of this are questions that seem to designed to assist in the consideration of the prisoner's dilemma.
Great book.
December 19, 2017
to be cont.'tell me how free I am'
Read
July 28, 2024I’m finding it hard to believe that no previous review of mine exists for this book!
The second novel from Richard Powers is no less sweeping nor inventive than its predecessor was. This one somehow brings together the mid-western U.S. family of the later 20th Century with Walt Disney, interned AJAs of the 1940s, Alamogordo, the World’s Fair “future” exhibit of 1939, logic puzzles, wordplay, etymology, entomology, first dates, last rites, Christmas, Thanksgiving, marriage, divorce, mysterious illnesses, vanishing jobs, vanishing people, and how it feels to be an individual in spite of being simultaneously a part of several of the foregoing groups. And the Ford Pinto. All Richard Powers’ novels are like this; or, at least, this one is.
The second novel from Richard Powers is no less sweeping nor inventive than its predecessor was. This one somehow brings together the mid-western U.S. family of the later 20th Century with Walt Disney, interned AJAs of the 1940s, Alamogordo, the World’s Fair “future” exhibit of 1939, logic puzzles, wordplay, etymology, entomology, first dates, last rites, Christmas, Thanksgiving, marriage, divorce, mysterious illnesses, vanishing jobs, vanishing people, and how it feels to be an individual in spite of being simultaneously a part of several of the foregoing groups. And the Ford Pinto. All Richard Powers’ novels are like this; or, at least, this one is.
April 9, 2025
I pity anyone who has to review a Richard Powers book on deadline. I'm imagining the scene back in 1988 as an advanced copy of Prisoner's Dilemma lands on the newspaper book editor's desk. She calls out, "Who wants to review the new one from Powers?" And ... crickets.
Because after just one book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Powers no doubt had a reputation. I bet everybody knew Prisoner's Dilemma was going to be a mine field. A novel inside a novel, filled with storylines and timelines doing impossible things, where obfuscation and confusion and uncertainty are par for the course. And a review of those reviews does indeed reflect confusion — and not a little bit of annoyance.
So here goes nothing. Prisoner's Dilemma is first a story about the dysfunctional Hobson family, though it is dysfunctional in a way that many people might find quite familiar, where jokes and quips and one-liners stand in for real conversations and feelings. But there is definitely something wrong with Pops, both physically and emotionally/mentally. Exactly what that is, and what to do about it, is the heart of the novel.
Which brings us to the novel-inside-the-novel, which is delineated by italics and interweaved throughout. It is Pops' story featuring Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse and WWII and America's emergence into a new/scary/uncertain world order. Exactly what it is about, though, is maybe also at the heart of the novel.
And then there's the third layer, which nearly eluded me as I read the book. It also is delineated by italics and interweaved throughout, but is written in first-person and with chapters that have titles instead of dates/events. I originally read these as part of the Hobson story, but these sections are possibly or partially autobiographical about Powers' own youth and family. Nevertheless, they weave inextricably into the Hobson narrative.
So does it work? Is this a good book? I think it is. And one of its underlying themes — the struggle of regular citizens to make a difference when their nation is acting immorally — would seem to be even more relevant today than ever.
And, as always with Richard Powers, there are some truly beautiful and devastating sentences here, ideas that arrested forward progress as their impact was felt.
Because after just one book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Powers no doubt had a reputation. I bet everybody knew Prisoner's Dilemma was going to be a mine field. A novel inside a novel, filled with storylines and timelines doing impossible things, where obfuscation and confusion and uncertainty are par for the course. And a review of those reviews does indeed reflect confusion — and not a little bit of annoyance.
So here goes nothing. Prisoner's Dilemma is first a story about the dysfunctional Hobson family, though it is dysfunctional in a way that many people might find quite familiar, where jokes and quips and one-liners stand in for real conversations and feelings. But there is definitely something wrong with Pops, both physically and emotionally/mentally. Exactly what that is, and what to do about it, is the heart of the novel.
Which brings us to the novel-inside-the-novel, which is delineated by italics and interweaved throughout. It is Pops' story featuring Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse and WWII and America's emergence into a new/scary/uncertain world order. Exactly what it is about, though, is maybe also at the heart of the novel.
And then there's the third layer, which nearly eluded me as I read the book. It also is delineated by italics and interweaved throughout, but is written in first-person and with chapters that have titles instead of dates/events. I originally read these as part of the Hobson story, but these sections are possibly or partially autobiographical about Powers' own youth and family. Nevertheless, they weave inextricably into the Hobson narrative.
So does it work? Is this a good book? I think it is. And one of its underlying themes — the struggle of regular citizens to make a difference when their nation is acting immorally — would seem to be even more relevant today than ever.
And, as always with Richard Powers, there are some truly beautiful and devastating sentences here, ideas that arrested forward progress as their impact was felt.
August 20, 2022
Not sure how to rate this, after 50 pages it looked like a DNF and after 100 I was thinking 2 stars. Then the historical bits became more interesting and I engaged some more and was thinking 4 stars for a while. However it was too slow for me and 50 pages too long so a solid 3 stars it is.
The story is about a family who's sole focus appears to be their father who sets them intellectual challenges and puzzles so that they can find out his past and what is causing him to be so unwell. None of them were particularly likeable or interesting to me.
The story is about a family who's sole focus appears to be their father who sets them intellectual challenges and puzzles so that they can find out his past and what is causing him to be so unwell. None of them were particularly likeable or interesting to me.
August 1, 2020
Stranamente non è riuscito a prendermi. L'ho mollato a metà. Magari lo finirò più avanti.
October 14, 2020
Powers uses game theory to try to answer age-old questions about human nature, humanity, etc. It’s a fabulous book, one I wouldn’t have appreciated 10 or 20 years ago, but one that moved me to tears now that I’m old as dirt and in a constant state of despair.
I can’t possibly review this book. It’s been two days since I finished it and merely reflecting on Eddie Hobson Sr. and his illnesses has brought tears to my eyes once again.
This is a deeply philosophical , deeply thought-provoking work. I don’t know that it always works and I think Powers’ female characters are reductive and Aileen, especially, is not quite lived-in. But even with those criticisms, I think it’s a masterpiece. The way Powers weaves the three narratives is impressive. There’s the family drama narrative set mainly in the late 70s, there’s the Disney as savior of interned Japanese Americans narrative (bold choice), and then there’s the more autobiographical narrative. They seems at odds with one another, but if you make it to the end, my god do they pay off.
For all it’s flaws, it’s an American masterpiece, a book I will carry with me for the rest of my life. This is a title worthy of re-evaluation. I look forward to hearing what smarter, better read people think about this one.
I can’t possibly review this book. It’s been two days since I finished it and merely reflecting on Eddie Hobson Sr. and his illnesses has brought tears to my eyes once again.
This is a deeply philosophical , deeply thought-provoking work. I don’t know that it always works and I think Powers’ female characters are reductive and Aileen, especially, is not quite lived-in. But even with those criticisms, I think it’s a masterpiece. The way Powers weaves the three narratives is impressive. There’s the family drama narrative set mainly in the late 70s, there’s the Disney as savior of interned Japanese Americans narrative (bold choice), and then there’s the more autobiographical narrative. They seems at odds with one another, but if you make it to the end, my god do they pay off.
For all it’s flaws, it’s an American masterpiece, a book I will carry with me for the rest of my life. This is a title worthy of re-evaluation. I look forward to hearing what smarter, better read people think about this one.
July 19, 2023
As always, Powers leaves you with a lot to think about… Our place in the universe, human nature, how we’re all “abandoned to the terrible abundance of being alive” - which has instantly become one of my favourite sentences…
With this novel, it took a lot more time for me to really become transported into the story world than with his other works I’ve read so far and the setting, for a European millennial, was a lot less identifiable than for example “The Overstory”, “Gain”, “Bewilderment” or “The Echo Maker”, but near the end I just couldn’t put the book down anymore.
I feel like I could use a good light reading experience to recover from this, however…
With this novel, it took a lot more time for me to really become transported into the story world than with his other works I’ve read so far and the setting, for a European millennial, was a lot less identifiable than for example “The Overstory”, “Gain”, “Bewilderment” or “The Echo Maker”, but near the end I just couldn’t put the book down anymore.
I feel like I could use a good light reading experience to recover from this, however…
April 24, 2008
I really liked it, but I still don't know why. I could read this book 20 times and still not catch everything he gets in there. Somewhat stream of consciousness, the book covers a family, plus a steadily mentally deteriorating father, plus Walt Disney's involvement in Japanese internment camps? Powers' encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly EVERYTHING is mind boggling, so his books are challenging but interesting.
May 7, 2017
I found this book to be a lot like The Corrections: if you enjoy verbose verbose description of the Human Condition and banal, annoying family members quibbling with each other for 300+ pages, then this is the book for you.
At this point in my life, I can affirm I don't need to read any more Russian literature or tales about the Great Depression. Because of Prisoner's Dilemma, now I can add Family Drama to that list.
At this point in my life, I can affirm I don't need to read any more Russian literature or tales about the Great Depression. Because of Prisoner's Dilemma, now I can add Family Drama to that list.
January 19, 2023
Maybe I'll like this better after book club.
Update: The general consensus at book club was that everyone respects the effort, but no one appreciated the unnecessary complexity.
Update: The general consensus at book club was that everyone respects the effort, but no one appreciated the unnecessary complexity.
May 4, 2024
It takes a good bit of the book before things start to come together for the reader. Delightfully different.
September 29, 2024
So like maybe I’m not smart enough but I didn’t care about what was happening. This is why I read fantasy.
August 20, 2025
I really enjoyed this, it reminded me a lot of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. excellent book
August 13, 2025
This is the first book I don’t finish 🥲 and my heart breaks that it had to be from Powers. I just got tired of missing every other reference. If anything, feeling much appreciation for the way his storytelling has evolved.
February 21, 2009
A wrenching work about filial piety and sibling rivalry which, if I am to be allowed a cinematic reference, bears strong thematic similarities to The Royal Tenenbaums, if only that family had been poorer and less photogenic folks who believed, as Powers says on p. 46, that "Enjoying life like everyone else might actually make things worse."
Edward Hobbs, Sr., is the patriarch of this particular odd clan, the sarcastic center about whom the rest of the Hobbs family - Ed's long-suffering wife Ailene, and their children Arthur (Artie, the character from whose point of view we see most of the story), Rachel, Lily and Eddie Jr. - perforce arrange their lives. But the senior Hobbs is an off-center focal point at best. Unquestionably intelligent and erudite, Eddie Senior is also subject to unexplained fugues which have alienated all of his former friends and driven him and his family halfway across America, from a comfortable high-school teaching position in Teaneck, New Jersey to unemployment in DeKalb, Illinois, a small town whose only distinction to the world at large is that barbed wire was invented there.
Eddie also appears to be dying, of some malaise neither he nor his family of misfit geniuses seem able to self-diagnose. It goes without saying (although actually very little goes without saying in the Hobbs household, where casual breakfast conversation is likely to revolve around questions that would stump a quiz-show researcher) that doctors have never been invited to examine Eddie.
Much of Prisoner's Dilemma focuses on the Hobbs clan's increasingly convoluted attempts to either explain, explain away, or deny altogether their leader's strange illness. It is a tribute to Powers' ability as a writer that this ongoing exercise, with snappy banter from all concerned, is tremendously engaging.
In parallel to this prosaic, if well-expressed, story of human interaction, Powers relates a plausible secret history of animator Walt Disney's decision to do something to ameliorate the World War II internment of nisei, Japanese-Americans who happen to include some of his best animators. The result, in Prisoner's Dilemma, is the remanding of some 10,000 nisei prisoners into Disney's custody, and the subsequent construction in a Midwestern field of something called "World World," a fantastic film set intended as the backdrop for the most impressive and persuasive propaganda film of Disney's career.
Powers uses this counterfactual to point out, yet again, that imprisoning the innocent for what they might do (but have shown no inclination to do) is a great wrong. Lacking the specific Ouija board which would have led him to mention Guantanamo by name (the book was, after all, written in 1988), Powers nevertheless captures moments yet to come through his depiction of the bygone. As his alternative Walt Disney says,
In a book this richly detailed, it's impossible to do more than point out highlights; rest assured that despite the clumsiness of this review, Prisoner's Dilemma rewards the careful reader quite as much as one might hope. Highly recommended.
Note: Page numbers are from the 2002 edition, a reissue of the 1996 trade paperback referenced here.
Edward Hobbs, Sr., is the patriarch of this particular odd clan, the sarcastic center about whom the rest of the Hobbs family - Ed's long-suffering wife Ailene, and their children Arthur (Artie, the character from whose point of view we see most of the story), Rachel, Lily and Eddie Jr. - perforce arrange their lives. But the senior Hobbs is an off-center focal point at best. Unquestionably intelligent and erudite, Eddie Senior is also subject to unexplained fugues which have alienated all of his former friends and driven him and his family halfway across America, from a comfortable high-school teaching position in Teaneck, New Jersey to unemployment in DeKalb, Illinois, a small town whose only distinction to the world at large is that barbed wire was invented there.
Eddie also appears to be dying, of some malaise neither he nor his family of misfit geniuses seem able to self-diagnose. It goes without saying (although actually very little goes without saying in the Hobbs household, where casual breakfast conversation is likely to revolve around questions that would stump a quiz-show researcher) that doctors have never been invited to examine Eddie.
Much of Prisoner's Dilemma focuses on the Hobbs clan's increasingly convoluted attempts to either explain, explain away, or deny altogether their leader's strange illness. It is a tribute to Powers' ability as a writer that this ongoing exercise, with snappy banter from all concerned, is tremendously engaging.
In parallel to this prosaic, if well-expressed, story of human interaction, Powers relates a plausible secret history of animator Walt Disney's decision to do something to ameliorate the World War II internment of nisei, Japanese-Americans who happen to include some of his best animators. The result, in Prisoner's Dilemma, is the remanding of some 10,000 nisei prisoners into Disney's custody, and the subsequent construction in a Midwestern field of something called "World World," a fantastic film set intended as the backdrop for the most impressive and persuasive propaganda film of Disney's career.
Powers uses this counterfactual to point out, yet again, that imprisoning the innocent for what they might do (but have shown no inclination to do) is a great wrong. Lacking the specific Ouija board which would have led him to mention Guantanamo by name (the book was, after all, written in 1988), Powers nevertheless captures moments yet to come through his depiction of the bygone. As his alternative Walt Disney says,
"That silent and well-mannered free-for-all is not inevitable. The world is not millions; it is one and one and one. It does not become an impasse until those ones start to renounce it. And they will have no cause to, if they stay tied to the good faith of others." (p. 265)
In a book this richly detailed, it's impossible to do more than point out highlights; rest assured that despite the clumsiness of this review, Prisoner's Dilemma rewards the careful reader quite as much as one might hope. Highly recommended.
Note: Page numbers are from the 2002 edition, a reissue of the 1996 trade paperback referenced here.
September 5, 2020
I like Powers quite a lot, but I couldn't get into this one. The eccentric patriarch of a quirky family is descending into an unknown illness, and his children undertake to determine its etiology. On his descent, the patriarch introduces the riddle of the "prisoner's dilemma," inviting his grown children to speculate on the solution to the puzzle as though that might save him.
The prisoner's dilemma (crudely) goes like this: Two co-conspirators are captured and under interrogation, and each is given the same 2 options: either keep quiet, or snitch on the other. The "payoff matrix" is such that cooperation between the parties (i.e. no one snitches) yields the lowest amount of jail time for each; vs. one person snitching lowers the jail time for the snitch, while increasing it for the silent prisoner, or; both parties snitch, and each party ends up with the maximum sentence.
The patriarch is in part rebelling against non-cooperation, and is hoping to bring his family to a similar conclusion through esoteric literary and historical (social and personal) allusions, in an attempt to rebut the inexorable logic of WWII and its aftermath.
The idea is good and interesting, I just was not at all engaged in its unfolding.
The prisoner's dilemma (crudely) goes like this: Two co-conspirators are captured and under interrogation, and each is given the same 2 options: either keep quiet, or snitch on the other. The "payoff matrix" is such that cooperation between the parties (i.e. no one snitches) yields the lowest amount of jail time for each; vs. one person snitching lowers the jail time for the snitch, while increasing it for the silent prisoner, or; both parties snitch, and each party ends up with the maximum sentence.
The patriarch is in part rebelling against non-cooperation, and is hoping to bring his family to a similar conclusion through esoteric literary and historical (social and personal) allusions, in an attempt to rebut the inexorable logic of WWII and its aftermath.
The idea is good and interesting, I just was not at all engaged in its unfolding.
October 23, 2021
10.19.21: This novel took me a long time to get through. It’s not a quick or easy read. And I still can’t articulate quite what it all means.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Powers is a brilliant thinker and writer. His novels (I’ve read two? Or three?) are sweeping and all-encompassing. He seems to set himself goals--huge philosophical questions and themes--and then he must stretch and strive to set down a story that illuminates those themes, and tries to answer, or at least explore, the questions. And for the most part he succeeds, I believe, even if I often feel lost during the search and discovery.
It’s definitely a book that I would read again; now that I (mostly) get the direction and the arc of his exploration, I think the story would be richer the second time around. I would struggle less with figuring out where he’s taking me now, and could focus on more of the journey itself. If that makes sense.
I don’t love challenging or dense novels for their own sake. But this one is worth the effort.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Powers is a brilliant thinker and writer. His novels (I’ve read two? Or three?) are sweeping and all-encompassing. He seems to set himself goals--huge philosophical questions and themes--and then he must stretch and strive to set down a story that illuminates those themes, and tries to answer, or at least explore, the questions. And for the most part he succeeds, I believe, even if I often feel lost during the search and discovery.
It’s definitely a book that I would read again; now that I (mostly) get the direction and the arc of his exploration, I think the story would be richer the second time around. I would struggle less with figuring out where he’s taking me now, and could focus on more of the journey itself. If that makes sense.
I don’t love challenging or dense novels for their own sake. But this one is worth the effort.
September 8, 2024
I hated this book. Slogged all the way through it. Shame, because I loved The Overstory so so much and adored his overall writing style. But here I found it so incredibly irritating, stagnant, and repetitive.
Eddie Hobson is the patriarch of an annoying family of four kids who idolize him as his health deteriorates and he refuses to get to the bottom of it. He and his children communicate exclusively in quizmaster-speak, like some kind of wannabe Kennedys-cum-Marx brothers. (You like my use of the Latin cum?) They reminded me a bit of my Shakespeare professor who was just so pleased to hear himself speak. There’s a Walt Disney-helmed jingoistic film production that hardly needs mentioning. I just couldn’t stand this book.
Eddie Hobson is the patriarch of an annoying family of four kids who idolize him as his health deteriorates and he refuses to get to the bottom of it. He and his children communicate exclusively in quizmaster-speak, like some kind of wannabe Kennedys-cum-Marx brothers. (You like my use of the Latin cum?) They reminded me a bit of my Shakespeare professor who was just so pleased to hear himself speak. There’s a Walt Disney-helmed jingoistic film production that hardly needs mentioning. I just couldn’t stand this book.
December 27, 2024
I bought this after the recent profile of Powers; I had tried to get into other books of his and supposedly enjoyed The Echo Maker even though I can't remember it particularly well. Anyway, this was difficult for ~150 pages, with six different points of view that each take about 20-30 pages each. By the time I'd rolled back around to one of the points of view for the third time, the extremely boring one, I thought, nope, this is why literary fiction often sucks! I get what he's trying to do and why he feels like he needs six different points of view to do it, but there's absolutely no narrative propulsion here. I'm done with Powers.
January 25, 2024
Almost closed it from boredom until I hit the Disney bits. Far, FAR too complicated and slow for me, with little payoff because the characters were only mildly charming with only mildly interesting dynamics. I appreciate the attempt and creativity towards an interesting portrayal of the concepts of freedom/guilt/trust (prisoners dilemma) but again, just so intensely boring and unnecessarily confusing and dense.
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