Gain

Rating:
Summary: Gain or Loss?
Review: "Gain" is a wholly admirable novel. Powers is obviously a writer of great intelligence, who doesn't mind hard work and has a head for research as well. And I learned an awful lot about soap.

So why was getting through "Gain" about as easy as plowing a field with a fork? I think the main reason is structural. The constant switching between the two narratives (which never meet in any really meaningful way) is jarring, and has the effect of diluting the tension. The history-book treatment of Clare struck me as too ponderous for a novel--maybe short vignettes would have been better. In terms of material, the protagonist, Laura Bodey, came across as a victim / symbol rather than as a fully-formed human being. And the clever mock ads for Clare products scattered throughout the text didn't convince me; they were too long and literary for this sort of thing. Maybe Powers hasn't watched enough TV. Next time you want to imitate pop culture, Richard, spend a few more hours in front of the tube!

Yet this book is packed with substance. It's full of evocative, precise writing, well-done scenes, and a really convincing grasp of its material. I just think Powers allowed his prodigious intellectuality to run out of control. A pretty good book that could have been much better.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: A book rich with capitalism with the humanistic repercussions felt by one woman dying of cancer- The book is rich in detail to the beginnings of an empire and what seems to be lost in its growth.

Rating:
Summary: Great book.. Highly recommended
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: ?People want everything. That?s their problem.?
Review: I have not read all of the books that Mr. Powers has written. This is the fourth, and while the writing is not as complex, with each subsequent phrase attempting to make its predecessor seem inferior, he has created a book that begins with two stories widely separated in time and brings them together with final pages that are emotionally devastating.

The wealth of knowledge this Author is known for is again evident in "Gain". The difference this time is that he shows an understanding of the human condition, its pain and its suffering as though he experiences the trauma as he writes. He writes about an experience we all will face, and it reads as though it is documented fact, not some mystic farce substituted for weak writing that lacks the skill that Mr. Powers has. His writing does not read as opinion, it feels as though you are reading the truth, that you are being told by someone who knows, and not just an authority on the topic, an articulate dandified product of academe, an erudite poser.

A man and his wife arrive in Boston. Over a century later the son of another woman, working across the river in Cambridge, will take the money from a legal outcome that is a direct result of that first man's arrival, and likely set in motion events that are orders of magnitude more powerful. It could be argued that the moment the first man decided to emigrate, the countless number of steps, the cascade of effects were irrevocably put in motion.

This tale could be dressed up as a form of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly in China whose delicate movements cause the East Coast of the US to be flooded. Mr. Powers does not need a curtain that wrapped the city of the Oz Wizard to conceal what he was unable to do. If Mr. powers were a magician, he could conjure all that illusionists do. Rolling up his sleeves would be meaningless, as he would require none.

Mr. Powers has demonstrated he can write at any level of complexity, on subjects that only token numbers of people can get their minds around. In this work he tells a story that we all have heard countless times. However this is the first time we have heard him tell it, and the similarities are almost nil. The real world is not black and white, and neither is this writer's prose. The quote that is the title of my comments is spoken at a moment, and by a person that will demonstrate how powerful a simple statement can be. But this is a Richard Powers' book, where even a simple declarative sentence is unbounded.

An incredible Author, and I have yet to read the book that almost all reviewers say is his best.

Rating:
Summary: A living company and a dead woman
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A powerful novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: It's Less Fun To Compute
Review: Let me begin by saying that I've read all of Powers' other novels and thought that his last, "Galatea 2.2", was one of the best books to be published within this decade; how he didn't win the National Book Award for that I'll never understand. But now he's back with a novel which, I think, shows every one of his weaknesses as a novelist and only a few of his strengths.

"Gain" tells two stories: on the one hand it's a history of a company from it's simple beginnings to present-day world domination--juxtaposed with this is the story of one woman's bout with cancer (which has been caused by the company whose history you learn along the way). While all of this sounds promising, and even interesting, Powers--time and time again--shows that he's more interested in the numbers and scientific processes of these institutions and histories than he is in the human beings involved. Powers has always been an incredibly intelligent and even arcane novelist (his most popular book "The Gold Bug Variations" was so laden with scientific riddles that many readers I know gave up half way through) but in "Gain" his numbers-superficiality reaches an all new high and a bone-numbing low. Powers really is a cold fish, and this is so amply shown in his workmanlike treatment of the character of Laura Bodey, the woman who gets cancer and goes through painful chemotherapy throughout the book; Powers is much more interested in all of her various dosages and medicines than in what's going on inside this poor woman's head. He has the bedside manner of a pocket calculator. As a doctor, that's just irritating, but as a novelist it's devastating because, without making any of these characters seem real, we're reluctant to invest any emotion into the story or even give a damn about the outcome.

Powers is definitely a genius, and I regret giving this book such an unfavorable review, but this book really is as cold and unforgiving as the modern day corporations he's writing about. Also, his ! prose here is remarkably stitled and flat. Sentences are annoyingly broken up into short little morse-codes bursts of informantion, impeding the flow of the narrative as well our own enjoyment of the words. Reading this book feels like taking small bites and having to chew too fast. I've been waiting for a new Powers novel for five years now, and was depressed when "Gain" was what I got; it feels more like a loss.

Rating:
Summary: Two Not-Quite-Parallel Stories
Review: Let me preface this by saying that I think Richard Powers is probably the smartest writer working today. I particularly like the breadth of his intelligence. When I read his novels I get the sense that this guy knows a lot of stuff about a lot of things.

Ususally, however, his cleverness is reflected also in the plot and characters of his novels. "The Gold Bug Variations" and "Galatea 2.2" were peopled by brilliant characters who gave voice to Power's intelligence. "Gain" seems to be more of an explication of Powers' understanding of the history of commerce and its influence on modern life and health than anything else.

Not that I didn't enjoy "Gain." In fact, I found Powers' history lesson in the store the Clares quite engaging. And the story of Laura's battle with cancer also had its moments though I didn't really care for her as much as I did the various Clares who claw their way to the top of the business world. Powers may be trying to say something about the evils of the corporation in the modern world but her seems to me to be more attached to the corporation he develops than the character.

Also, I found the switches between the stories every few pages to be a bit jarring; particularly because they are only loosely connected. Toxins produced by the Clare Corporation may (or may not) have caused Laura's cancer but this is not really enough to draw the stories together. Not a single character intersects the two stories, even at the end to draw the stories together. Each story has its own merits but they are really different stories. Worth reading, but probably easier to read separately.

Rating:
Summary: Very good fiction that reads like excellent nonfiction
Review: No, this is not my favorite Richard Powers book (I have read them all). The two storylines were both linear with no surprising plot twists of the sort that enlivened "Three Farmers" or "Gold Bug". There were fewer instances of the verbal pyrotechnics or lush poetic phrasing of "Operation Wandering Soul" and "Gold Bug". Instead, "Gain" felt to me like a well-crafted nonfiction piece, clearly painstakingly researched and convincingly composed through the accumulation of evocative details so that you could believe this was a true account, sort of a less outrageous version of a Stephen Glass-type story. (Another more literary comparison would be with "Martin Dressler" by Steven Milhauser, which chronicles the self-made man and the rise of the department store in the early 20th century.)

Still, "Gain" is well-written in Powers's classically precise style, which some may find cold but which I love be! cause of its timeless beauty, something I find in Keats poetry (negative capability, perhaps?). Although it is less evident in this novel, Powers can write fully realized characters who evince honest emotion. The dialogue between the history of the Clare company and Laura Bodey's decline in this story is the main concept at work in this novel, and much of the reward of reading this book lies in pondering the dialogue between the two story threads. I had the good fortune to attend Powers's reading of this book in San Francisco, and he stated there that much of the inspiration for this book arose from having lost several friends and family members to cancer over the years and feeling a need to understand how and why this happens. Powers decided to explore the relationship between ailments related to our contemporary environment and the evolution of the corporate infrastructure which has largely created the consumer environment in which we live. He did emphasize that he ha! d no agenda with regard to whether industrialization was go! od or bad but rather wanted to explore how the evolution of big business has enhanced consumers' lives in many ways while exacting a price in other ways.

In short, you will find yet another instalment of Powers's ongoing portait of America and Americans who dream in this book. Despite the fact that there is less emotional connection with the characters than in some of his other novels, "Gain" is nonetheless a brilliantly rendered dialogue involving our needs, wants, and dreams.

Rating:
Summary: Two Things to Be Feared: Capitalism Run Amok and Cancer
Review: 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.