GAIN
By Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 355 pages, $25
Take two qualities that are not so much opposite but simply, regretfully, unrelated: intelligence and compassion. Author Richard Powers combines both qualities in his sixth book, “Gain,” which consists equally of horizon-busting breadth of knowledge and excruciating depth of vulnerability. An inch to one side and he’d be sucked into the swamp of sentimentality; an inch in the other direction, he’d float into cerebral ether. Instead, Powers hovers impossibly between extremes with a tightrope walker’s perfect balance. He may be at once the smartest and the most warm-hearted novelist in America today.
Although these qualities were evident in Powers’ earlier work, they are more obvious in his latest novel, because of the book’s structure. In parallel sequences, “Gain” tells the stories of the vast, multinational Clare Soap and Chemical Co. and of Laura Bodey, a divorced mother of two, working as a real-estate agent in Lacewood, Ill., where Clare maintains a divisional headquarters.
The Clare saga begins in 1802, when founder Jephthah Clare steps off a boat from England to Boston. Jephthah is a merchant, one of whose commodities is soap. But when trade declines, his sons-Samuel, Benjamin and Resolve-move into manufacturing. Struck by the “hard, cold light” from a candle hawked by a poor Irish immigrant, the sons decide that because candles, like soap, are but fat rendered, they can handle this stuff. They hire the man with the candle recipe and are off and running. Through luck and pluck, their enterprise, like the nation it clearly allegorizes, expands-from soap to detergent to chemicals and munitions.
Helped by railroads that shrink and telegraphs that obliterate space, Clare and the adolescent U.S. conquer the continent, though not without growing pains. The Civil War requires ablution on an unheard-of scale. We experience panics and booms. Clare incorporates, goes public, discovers advertising, is threatened by behemoths larger than itself.
By focusing upon one exemplary product, Powers examines the transformative effects of industry, commerce and science. Yet just as he discerns the big things, he also catches the little ones, delivering the minutiae of soapmaking with a passion that most writers would lavish on lovemaking. Factories may crank out soap by the trainload, but Powers describes the texture, shape, scent and label of individual bars with a stunningly observant eye that makes the abstract specific. Look at just one instance of his luminous style:
“The resulting slabs were a mystery to behold. Here was a substance, grease’s second cousin. Yet something had turned waste inside out. Dirt’s duckling transformed to salve’s swan. . . .”
Sadly, while Clare thrives, one woman who lives in the shadow of one of its plants does not. Laura Bodey has ovarian cancer, caused–maybe–by Clare, and she is doomed. Powers tracks Laura’s disease as intimately as he does Clare’s assembly line: cyst to diagnosis to the ravages of chemotherapy. In these sections, “Gain” contains more pain than almost any book this reviewer can recall.
And yet despite its abundance of observation and emotion, and despite its sentence-by-sentence splendor, something is missing from “Gain.” The missing ingredient is so large, it’s hard to conceive of any modern novelist–let alone one as prodigiously talented as Powers–missing it: evil. That is, Evil and its attendant demons, venality, pettiness, lust.
During their troubles, not one member of the Bodey family, neither wilting Laura nor flip high schooler Ellen nor 12-year-old computer whiz Tim nor ex-husband Don, displays anything less than spiritual aplomb. At first, this underlines the book’s sorrow–terrible things shouldn’t happen to such nice people–but finally one wonders about their humanity.
Nor are the Clare brothers or their descendants really reprehensible. Oh, some may engage in cunning business practices, and some are boring bean counters, and eccentricities proliferate with the decades and the dollars, but the generations of Clares are uniformly decent and honorable soldiers of capital. Serving this giant as it rewards them with wealth, they are as much its product as its producer.
Many readers will probably impute evil to the corporation itself, yet that’s not accurate either. In fact, Clare Co. is quite responsible. Early to enact profit sharing and give workers Saturdays off, it remains relatively unscathed amid early 20th Century union upheavals. Besides, we are not talking tobacco here–secret tests and criminally concealed memos–but cleanliness and health and genuine prosperity. Life is better with Clare.
Even the cancer does not seem bad. After all, growth is all it knows. At one point, Laura thinks:
“(N)othing is safe. We are all surrounded. Cucumber and squash and baked potato. . . . Garden sprays. Cooking oils. Cat litter. . . . Water. Air. The whole planet, a superfund site. Life causes cancer.”
Ultimately, Powers suggests that the cancer, like the company, like Laura herself, is part of the same organic process and merely subject to growth’s blind imperative.
Though its overt subjects, business and disease, are brutally real, “Gain” has a utopian feel that rings not so much false as true to some other, wishful-thinking world created by a pure heart and a philosophical mind. This imparts a fairy-tale quality to both the Clare-ascendant and Laura-sinking sections of “Gain.”
Of course, books do not require mustache-twirling villainy, but such local and global miseries cry out for blame if not redress, rage if not resolution, or, if nothing more, rage at the lack of resolution. At most, however, a mild, infrequent snippiness intrudes on the passivity of “Gain.” When Don tries to persuade Laura to join a class-action suit against Clare, she thinks:
“Sue them. . . . Every penny they are worth. Break them up for parts.
“And in the next blink: a weird dream of peace. It makes no difference. . . .”
Laura’s resignation may make sense for an afflicted individual, but Clare exhibits the same strange acquiescence. When government lawyers discovered there was nothing Indian nor medicinal about Native Balm, the company’s first major success, the Clare-family member then at the helm “pulled the plug with deep regret, and the original magic name disappeared from circulation.” Both high marketplace magic and one ordinary woman’s existence cease without more than a moment’s reflective nostalgia.
For all this novel’s stunning literary beauty and heartfelt grief, its overriding effect is that of abidingness. We come out as spotless as if we’ve taken a bath in the company’s top-of-the-line cosmetic cleanser, scoured of the unpleasant odor and grit of any of the dark side of human nature. Maybe that’s how Powers can maintain his incredible balance between intelligence and sweetness. His kingdom is that of a God who never permits the hint of evil to infect his garden. Unfortunately, we no longer live in the garden.
