Corporeality

Richard Powers's sixth novel measures the fruits of American capitalism, in sickness and in health

by Adam Kirsch

GAIN, by Richard Powers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pages, $25.

Admirers of Richard Powers, one of the most lavishly praised novelists of his generation, have often compared him with writers of the previous generation, especially DeLillo and Pynchon. But Gain, Powers's sixth novel, makes such comparisons awkward and unnecessary -- not because Powers is their inferior as a novelist, but because his new book, half epic and half domestic tragedy, is largely free of their varieties of postmodern play. Indeed, Gain is notable above all for qualities that predate postmodernism: strong narrative, descriptive realism, restrained symbolism, and language that strives to be not outrageous but beautiful. These are the elements of a major novel, and Gain only confirms that Powers is, in fact, a major American novelist.

Two narratives wind their way through the novel, divided by time and (at first) seemingly unrelated except by geography. The first is set in the present: as the story opens, Laura Rowen Bodey, a real-estate agent and mother of two, is tending her garden in the Midwestern town of Lacewood, home to the chemical-products conglomerate Clare -- think of Dow Corning or Procter & Gamble. The second is set in early-19th-century Boston, where the firm's founder, Jephthah Clare, is a rising merchant wringing a fortune from transatlantic trade. As the novel proceeds, Powers gradually and subtly merges the two strands, and it becomes clear that we are being told the whole history of the Clare Corporation up until the moment when, in Lacewood, Laura is unexpectedly diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Without forcing, Powers allows the true subject of the two stories to emerge: the idea of gain, its promise, and its often deceptive price.

For Jephthah Clare, gain is the elusive, almost magical margin of profit that each transaction yields. For his sons, driven down the social ladder into manufacturing by the imposition of tariffs on trade, it is the fruit of the chemical processes they use to transform animal fats and potash into candles and soap. And for successive generations of Clares -- who see the company grow into a corporation, then into a multinational venture, through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and the 1950s -- it becomes the talisman of everything American industry hopes to accomplish: mastery of nature, material abundance, prosperity, wealth.

For Laura, however, the legacy of the Clare corporation is much more ambiguous. Even before her illness, it is clear that Laura thinks about gain in a different way -- as in, "What have we gained by all this material progress?" Her two children are sunk deep in the culture of acquisition, clamoring for computer games and clothes and prepackaged junk food -- they become almost loathsome to her, and to the reader, in their insistence on having more and more. When she is diagnosed, and eventually realizes that a mini-epidemic of cancer in the town may be related to the effluents the Clare factories produce, it comes only as the last in a series of industrial evils, most of them far less tangible than disease.

The possibility here for social protest is clear, and Powers does not shy away from it: there is heavy irony in the fact that a company that began by selling cleanliness ends by spreading pollution. But Gain is too rich and full a novel to give way to theorizing and attack. (The contrast with Underworld, another epic novel about the dark side of American material success, is telling -- there is very little of DeLillo's shrill insistence here.) Instead, Powers sympathizes with and lavishes fictional attention on both Laura and Clare, rather than using one to critique the other.

Necessarily, he is slower and more deliberate in telling Laura's tale. It is here that he creates his fullest, most living characters: bewildered, hardened Laura; her well-meaning and exasperating ex-husband, Don; her sarcastic daughter, Ellen, and her computer-geek son, Tim, who mistrust her and whom she loves from a suspicious distance. The novel takes Laura all the way through her illness, and Powers's descriptions of cancer -- both the details of medical procedures and the evocation of the patient's experience -- are careful and moving, painstaking and painful. Perhaps most carefully described of all is Laura's attitude toward the class-action suit against Clare that Don wants her to join. Instead of anger at Clare, Laura exhibits a much more subtle, wiser appreciation of what Clare -- and, by extension, all corporate America -- has done to her:

The newspapers, Don, the lawyers: everybody outraged at the offense. As if cancer just blew in through the window. Well, if it did, it was an inside job. Some accomplice, opening the latch for it. She cannot sue the company for raiding her house. She brought them in, by choice, toted them in a shopping bag. And she'd do it all over again, given the choice. Would have to.

It is clear throughout that Powers is not attacking capitalism's plenty -- though there is hostility in the novel toward all the cheap, synthesized, artificial things that surround us -- so much as he is describing the way we live, for good and ill.

And he is very far from simply attacking Clare as a soulless, rapacious corporation. Indeed, half the novel is spent on a loving chronicle of Clare's rise and rise. Here the influence is not DeLillo or Pynchon but Mann's Buddenbrooks -- Powers, like Mann, delights in showing the minute twists and turns of a firm's fate. We see how factors chemical and economic -- from the British monopoly on soda ash to the Panic of 1873 to the Knights of Labor -- conspire to transform Clare from a family business whose advertisements are hortatory Biblical-style slogans ("Be clean in the eyes of creation./For He is like a Refiner's Fire.") to an inconceivably vast, self-sustaining conglomerate that speaks in the cloying jargon of PR ("It's elementary: your life is chemistry. So is ours").

As a result of his novelistic disinterest -- which is not the same as indifference -- Powers allows his two stories to make Gain a greater whole. It is a novel of ideas, a historical novel, and a domestic drama, and each of these elements informs and broadens the others. In the wake of novels as supercharged with theory as DeLillo's and Pynchon's latest, Gain demonstrates how fiction can address social problems in a way proper to it: by mediating issues through characters. Reading Richard Powers, one is filled with hope that the art of the novel has many successes still ahead.

Adam Kirsch is the literary assistant at the New Republic.