Gain

Rating:
Summary: What's With This Guy?
Review: You keep giving Richard Powers a try. He's so talented!, is what you say to yourself as you resolutely crack yet another of his boring, droning books. What's the problem. Hmm. They're very puritanical books, for one thing. There is always the implication that messing around has been happening somewhere in the background but gonads don't even make a cursory appearance. And here's a book that's in large part about ovarian cancer--but where's the gonads? Look, I don't want porno, just honest tales about reasonably excitable, if you know what I mean, people. But that's not all. Hey, in Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance there were two parallel story lines occuring at different points in time. In Plowing the Dark the same thing. In Operation Wandering Soul, yep, a bunch of stories told against the background of a contemporary story. And here we go again in Gain. Powers, have you worn this device out yet? I mean, it's really boring! It's not hardly "innovative." They keep tagging you for being this "innovative" writer; I keep reading these quotes where David Foster Wallace says you're god and Steven Moore says that copious tears dropped from his academic's eyes when he read about Taimur Martin's problems in Beirut, but, come on! Start innovating already! Your prose is so boring as to induce narcolepsy! Oh, you're such a smarty. And you do so much research! But you're so predictable, with your cardboard characters (strong woman, manipulative man, suspiciously mendacious authority figure, unctuous corporate type), with your habit of using three or four words where one (or none!) would suffice. Who cares? You're forty-four, now, Richard! Start writing like a man instead of a smarty-pants college freshman! OK? Enough already!