Artificial intelligence, learning, and the limits of human understanding — written before those topics became marketing categories.

The narrator, a version of Powers himself, works with a cognitive scientist to train a neural network to pass a postgraduate literature exam, while circling questions about consciousness, authorship, love, and what it means to “understand” a text.

What makes the book last is its refusal to simplify. No sci-fi futurism or tech optimism; it’s a slow, thinking novel about intelligence as a relational process — between machines, people, and language. Dense in places, funny in others, a good little read.