Operation Wandering Soul is dark. Very dark. Dark yet beautiful. Littered with alliteration, assonance and any number of other poetic devices, Powers' prose is anything but prosaic. I found myself reading very slowly, savoring the beauty of the language, not only because the themes of the novel are so dark that I was afraid to reach the end (and I was a little bit worried that Powers will pull his punch at the finish), but also because I was afraid that the end was so near.

Operation Wandering Soul is about mortgaging the future to feed the excess of the present and the devastation that such deficit thinking saddles upon our children. One of the principal themes of the novel is children wandering too far from home. This theme is emphasized by the retelling of a number of "children's stories", including Peter Pan, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the Children's Crusade. As a whole, the novel tells the story of a ne'er-grown-up man, serving in the trenches of a pediatric surgery rotation, and his struggle to come to grips with both his past and the bleak futurepresent he tries desparately but vainly to repair. This theme is embodied by the ruined children of his ward, in particular a young girl named Joy, who is being destroyed by some sort of body-wasting cancer that may or may not be operable (I won't give away one of the interesting "twists" at the end).

I'm disappointed that only Kraft (the surgeon) was fully developed as a character. There was a great deal of promise in the young girl Joy that was never realized, and Linda (Kraft's lover) never rose above a do-gooder caricature. Even with these flaws, Operation Wandering Soul is excellent, securing Richard Powers' position in my pantheon of contemporary writers.