Gain

A.O. Scott

What is most remarkable about this novel is how much life is in it, and how much intelligence. -- New York Review of Books

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A novelist who has always taken inspiration from scientific and historical research, most recently in the AI-centered "Galatea 2.2", Powers now follows the lead of environmentally concerned writers Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody by returning to the great (newly literalized) myth behind Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables": that the tainted American soil will take revenge on us for the sins of our exploitative fathers. In Powers's ambitious but mechanical novel, the victim is Laura Bodey, a real estate agent and single mother whose Midwestern town of Lacewood is polluted with mysterious carcinogens produced by its biggest employer, the Clare Soap and Chemical corporation. Laura's battle with ovarian cancer takes up half the book, but the novel really belongs to Clare itself. Interspersing Laura's story with the company's history from 1820s Boston to the present, Powers touches lightly on myriad aspects of American life over the last 170 years: the millennialist religious revival of William Miller, the Civil War, the changing fashions of advertising (perhaps the novel's most entertaining subplot), the history of labor and management. Although they never mesh with Laura's present-day misadventures ("tragedy" is much too strong for such an academic book), the Clare chronicles play to Powers's strengths (literary pastiche, historical and scientific summary, witty description, a knack for idyll) and cover his weaknesses (clunky dialogue, flat characters, portentous commonplaces). The result is impressive and imaginative, albeit a little puzzling. Powers has given us the historical novel as survey coursea curiosity that we never knew we needed but that we can't keep from admiring.

Library Journal

"Endless civilization advances, and we do everything but live." Against the historical backdrop of the rise of the successful Clare Soap & Chemical Company is the story of Laura Bodey, realtor, homemaker, and soon-to-be full-time cancer patient. The novel alternates between Clare's 150-year history and Laura's battle, and it's clear from the beginning that Clare's products are the cause of Laura's condition; as we see Clare thrive and weather the varied problems that come along, Laura continues to decline. The contrast between the two stories seems to be both ironic and tragic at the same time, with the huge corporation silently progressing, blissfully unaware of its unintended victims. What saves the book from being too one-note is the flawed of course but sympathetic Bodey family, and the author has certainly done his homework on the business end; Clare's long history is rigorously detailed from candles to chemicals. A somber book, not to everyone's taste, but Powers "Galatea 2.2.", LJ 5/15/95 always has something important to say in his works, and this is worth considering for larger collections. Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA

Quinn

One of the exceptional American novels of recent years.
—Times Literary Supplement

Rick Moody

The Road to success, in this land of swashbuckling corporate raiders, is littered with innocent dead...Richard Powers' deceptively simple and terrifyingly effective novel Gain says it better than anyone has in a long time: buyer beware." -- Voice Literary Supplement

Greil Marcus

Richard Powers has proven himself a visionary writer. He has burrowed his way inside history and imagined how, and why, it might have turned out differently. -- San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

Melvin Jules Bukiet

Powers may be at once the smartest and the most warm-hearted novelist in America today. -- Chicago Tribune

Bruce Bawer

Erudite, penetrating and splendidly written... -- The New York Times Book Review

Gail Caldwell

Intellectually dazzling...<>i>Gain is an impressive synthesis of [a] swatch of history that made America huge. -- Boston Globe

Kirkus Reviews

Never one to tread lightly or think small, Powers ("Galatea 2.2", 1995, etc.) here tackles 170 years of US capitalism as embodied by a single corporation, binding it to the struggle of a midwestern mom to a cancer most likely caused by the same company's malfeasance. The candle-and-soap outfit begun in Boston in the 1830s by the three Clare brothers first built a reputation on its medicinal soap, the secret ingredient of which came from a root given the youngest Clare on a surveying expedition to the South Seas. Prosperity came when the brothers were chosen as a soap supplier to the Army, and diversity followed as the ever-expanding company moved into home, industrial, and agricultural commodities. At the turn of the century, Clare Soap and Chemical chose the sleepy town of Lacewood, Illinois, as the site of its Agricultural Products group. Since then, the fate of the town has been tied tightly to the fate of the multinational corporation. None of this matters to Laura Bodey, a competent, plant-loving single mother of two teenagers whose only links to Clare, Inc., are the homebuyers brought into her realty office as a result of the company's booming business. After being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, however, she begins to become aware of reports concerning widespread industrial pollution by Lacewood's corporate benefactor. Surgery and chemotherapy fail to keep the monstrous cancer at bay, but even as she grows weaker Laura resists joining a class-action suit against Clare, refusing to believe that any of the company's products could have done this to her—until confronted by evidence from her beloved garden. The personal story is wrenching in its detail, and the larger point isamply made, but interest in the corporate history itself, which is not only weighty but a tad dull in the balance, proves harder to sustain. Yet another unconventional work from Powers, a novelist who never does the same thing twice, but not his strongest.