[.ca] Gain: A Novel (ISBN 0312204094)

From Amazon.com:
Richard Powers made his debut in 1985 with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, a brilliant and almost unbelievably brainy meditation on what he calls "our tortured century." Since then he has produced four more novels, showcasing his mastery of genetics, art history, computer science, theology, aesthetics, and a host of other pointy-headed fields. The author's range--and the meticulous music of his prose, which suggests a considerably less zany Thomas Pynchon--is mind-boggling. Yet his subject remains fairly constant: the acceleration, and consequent dehumanization, of contemporary life. In Gain, Powers puts our modernity through the wringer once again. This time, though, he points the finger at one villain in particular: rampant, American-style capitalism, as exemplified by a conglomerate called Clare International. His novel, it should be said, is no piece of agitprop, but an intricate lamination of two separate stories. On one hand, Powers describes the rise (and fall and rise) of the Clare empire, beginning in its mercantile infancy: "That family flocked to commerce like finches to morning. They clung to the watery edge of existence: ports, always ports. They thrived in tidal pools, half salt, half sweet." The author's Clare-eyed narrative amounts to a pocket history of corporate America, and a marvelously entertaining one. Lest we get too enamored of this success story, though, Powers introduces a second, countervailing tale, in which a 42-year-old resident of Lacewood, Illinois, is stricken with ovarian cancer. Lacewood happens to be the headquarters of Clare's North American Agricultural Products Division, and lo and behold, it seems that chemical wastes from the plant may be the source of Laura Bodey's illness. The analogy between corporate and cancerous proliferation is pointed--too pointed, perhaps. But no other recent novelist has written so knowingly, and with such splendid indignation, about capitalism and its discontents.

Two Things to Be Feared: Capitalism Run Amok and Cancer:
To read Richard Powers is to be crucified by his immense knowledge of any subject he chooses to put forth. His stories drip and ooze pain in all forms, and the sheer amount of grief, loss, and agony his characters go through command your every thought and emotion while you read one of his works. None of his things are easy, either literally or emotionally. Having said that, I first read 'Gain' at the suggestion of a professor in early August of last year. Little did I know at the time that my mother would be afflicted by ovarian cancer little more than a month after I finished reading it. I immediately delved into it again, knowing that Powers does his research, but the thought that kept coming back to me was that he must have had someone near to him go through this. The novel's too personal, too glib in its inner workings to not have been written by someone with an intimate and painful knowledge of cancer. This novel becomes a primer on how to deal with the death of someone you love by this unthinking disease... and not in a pleasant 'things are alright' way, like Hansen's 'The Chess Garden'... no, Powers holds the reader by the sheer force of his will and the vivid pain that his characters emanate. He says over and over again: 'Look at this. Experience it. Avoid it. Do what you must, because there's no other way.' His descriptions of the breakdown, both emotional and physical, of his victimized family unit and detailed, honest, and can not be denied. This is an excellent novel, full of hatred, spite, and bitterness, but it can be no other way. A compelling read, but not if the subject is too close to you.

Great book.. Highly recommended:
Powers is able to write both historically, (the history of Claire) and personally, ( Laura's struggle) with equal skill. His style is concise and quick moving without sacrificing depth and thoughtfulness. As another reviewer pointed out: he does not preach. He leaves the moral judgement of the role of the conglomerate up to the reader. Too many times the baggage a 'serious' novelist brings to the table manifests in a ' look at me-I'm smart ' tone. Not here. This guy writes circles around his rock star persona peers ( Wallace, Eggers et al) and deserves a wide readership. A great book.

An Amazing Book:
First: a confession. I am writing this review because of another review which refers to Powers as a "cold fish" (as if that's a bad thing!). That said, this is a review and not a discussion forum. Richard Powers is not the world's most emotional writer, and those reading him and wanting an emotional roller-coaster with beautiful love story and a happy ending had best look elsewhere. I find his books deeply moving on occasion, but the main thrill of reading them is for insight. It's really quite easy to jerk tears, but to shed light on true mysteries is a gift. There's a passage in "Gain", close to the end, which strikes me as having been written or thought of first. It stabs deeply through the layers of what makes our modern society work and then illuminates what it reveals it suddenly and briefly and then disappears. It begins as a description of the way glossy cardstock is made. Structurally, this book is very simple. Two stories told in alternating streams in third person past tense. One is of a single divorced mother's struggle to raise a family and deal with cancer. "Terms of Endearment" without the astronaut. The second is the history of a multinational corporation -- it could be any of a dozen household names, and the story is not so different from the official company histories you might read (only far better written than those I have read). I find the family story very touching and tiny details of it ring true -- the relationships, dialogue, and the flashes of insight into the little things that make life both horrible and wonderful are beautifully and economically rendered. The story of the company is sometimes dry stuff, but while the family's story (a broken home, not incidentally) is like a slice of life today, the story of the company is a slice through the history of corporate America. The intersection of the two stories is the cancer which devastates the family. My favorite thing about this book is that it isn't preachy or overtly judgmental. Any conclusions you draw from reading it are your own. This is not a book about the evils of capitalism, or the tragedy of cancer, or how we must return to nature. This is a book that shows us the author's vision of how capitalism works, why it works, and the price we pay for it.

A powerful novel:
In this heart-wrenching and epic novel, Mr Powers tells two parallel stories both set in the town of Lacewood, Illinois. The first one is about Laura Rowen Bodey, divorced mother of Ellen, aged seventeen, and Tim, aged twelve. Laura is a successful real-estate agent at Next Millennium Realty. But one day, doctors tell Laura that she has ovarian cancer. The other story is about a company begun by three merchant brothers in the 1850s in Boston, Clare Soap and Chemical. By the turn of the Millennium, this company has turned into a large multiconglomerate with factories in Lacewood, Laura Bodey's hometown. A powerful, subtle and provocative novel accurately depicting the messianism of corporate America. Laura's story is one of the excruciating depth of vulnerability whereas the one about Clare Chemicals shows Mr Powers' horizon-busting breath of knowledge. His prose is erudite, penetrating and splendidly written.

A living company and a dead woman:
I've never read a book anything like this one, and reading it forced me to throw out most of my usual methods of judgment. Most of the human characters, despite obvious effort and even empathy from the author, are ridiculously flimsy. They are carefully observed, and given a consistent group of characteristics, in the hope that this cluster of traits will somehow give them a life that they never succeed in having. The prose is excellent, but it's fussy and shows the marks of being intensely labored over, which makes it even harder to think of the people as genuine instead of words drawns from the mind of a brainy novelist. The dialogue is some of the worst I've ever read in a book of genuine literary merit, and although I applaud Powers his honest effort in trying to capture the conversational rhythms of a Midwestern family, I can honestly say that he missed it by a country mile. But for some reason, this doesn't scuttle the book - the main character, a woman dying of cancer, is never fully real, and neither is her family, and somehow this isn't all that important. Powers fails in most of the things that I usually value in a novel, but succeeds in finding beauty in places where I'd never even thought to look - in places where authors almost never bother to look. The story of the Clare Corporation is one of the most thrilling pieces of storytelling in American literature and I honestly had to fight the urge not to flip past the sections dealing with Laura's struggles, which is an astounding achievement considering that in the hands of a lesser author the Clare sections could easily have read like a textbook. Powers has obviously researched this material exhaustively, but in translating the history into fiction he has given it energy as well as solidity - it vibrates with the enthusiasm he feels for the material. He genuinely feels his way into the skin and blood of a company; he understands the thrill of production and expansion and success, as well as the achievement all of it represents. A couple of reviews I read tagged this as an anti-business book, which just indicates that their perspective is much smaller than Gain's. Powers is too big an author for anything so simplistic; his viewpoint is more subtle and finally much more disturbing, and will stay in your mind long after most of his characters have been forgotten.