The Procedure
Harry Mulisch
Translated by Paul Vincent
Viking, $24.95, 230 pp.
A current exhibit at New York's Museum of Natural History depicts the 3 billion letters of the human genome as filling 140 Manhattan telephone books. In The Procedure, Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch more provocatively describes the genome as "five hundred bibles...by which you are completely determined." In a previous novel, The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch compared the universe as divine creation to ...