Novelist Richard Powers thrives at the intersection of science and wonder, raising questions that illuminate the human condition. In his provocative ninth novel, he poses an intriguing query guaranteed to spark the imagination: What would happen if we discovered a gene for happiness?

Powers, who appears Wednesday at Miami Book Fair International, returns to a favorite subject -- genomics -- in Generosity: An Enhancement (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25). He had explored the topic in his third and best-known book, The Gold Bug Variations, in 1991, in which he built a story about genetics, computer science and music.

``Genomics raises very old questions,'' he explains. ``You look at literature going all the way back to the invention of writing, these questions of fate and destiny. How much of us is scripted? How much of us can we rewrite? Is our fate in ourselves? . . . Fiction is a great place to explore these things. . . . The novel can have facts, characters, places, historical events, purely imaginary relationships, multiple focal centers, lots of ideas and passions colliding with each other in this rich soup that wonderfully recreates the turbulent soup of the genome.''

Generosity examines the idea of how we become who we are through the experiences of Russell Stone, a writer teaching a course in creative nonfiction at a Chicago university. The first evening of class he is startled by his improbably upbeat student Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian immigrant with every reason to feel beaten down by the world. Astonishingly, she literally glows with good will. Her bliss is so remarkable, however, that it brings her to the attention of a famous -- some might say infamous -- geneticist, who hopes to map her genes, unleash the secret of happiness and market it to the world, or at least to the parts that can afford it.

New scientific breakthroughs inspired Powers to build the new novel around genetics.

``What the research is showing had changed the whole world view from when I wrote the last book on genomics,'' he says. Then, ``all the scientists thought we had 120,000 genes and that each one IDed one protein, and we'd do a map of the genome and find a kind of one-for-one mapping of genes with traits. But, in fact, the picture has turned out different. The number of genes is far smaller; the number of proteins is far larger than expected. So instead of this simple, deterministic one-for-one match, we have a much more complex system. . . . I think 20 years ago you might have heard people say `Nature vs. nurture.' Now the prevailing idea is `Nature through nurture.' ''

Yet Powers, who lives in Champaigne-Urbana, Ill., isn't only concerned with the science of the story; he also deals equally with the emotional aspects in his novels.

In The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, he explored two deeply complex issues through the story of a young man injured in a truck accident: the intricacies of family relationships and the mysterious workings of the brain.

Generosity also blends a variety of elements, touching on themes of love and friendship as it explores larger questions about science, responsibility and the destructive power of the U.S. consumer society.

``I think the book really is more about the public misunderstanding of genomics,'' he says. ``At the same time science says, `This is unfolding, and it's so much richer and more involved and dynamic than we thought,' the public -- understandably because of simplification in the media -- thinks this is just the next consumer product. We will get control over our destiny, and we will replace it with choice. These are very ancient feelings, the idea of knowledge becoming power.''

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