Gain - Hardcover

In Gain, Powers puts our modernity through the wringer once again. This time, though, he points the finger at one villain in particular: rampant, American-style capitalism, as exemplified by a conglomerate called Clare International. His novel, it should be said, is no piece of agitprop, but an intricate lamination of two separate stories. On one hand, Powers describes the rise (and fall and rise) of the Clare empire, beginning in its mercantile infancy: "That family flocked to commerce like finches to morning. They clung to the watery edge of existence: ports, always ports. They thrived in tidal pools, half salt, half sweet." The author's Clare-eyed narrative amounts to a pocket history of corporate America, and a marvelously entertaining one. Lest we get too enamored of this success story, though, Powers introduces a second, countervailing tale, in which a 42-year-old resident of Lacewood, Illinois, is stricken with ovarian cancer. Lacewood happens to be the headquarters of Clare's North American Agricultural Products Division, and lo and behold, it seems that chemical wastes from the plant may be the source of Laura Bodey's illness. The analogy between corporate and cancerous proliferation is pointed--too pointed, perhaps. But no other recent novelist has written so knowingly, and with such splendid indignation, about capitalism and its discontents.

"Powers is a writer of blistering intellect; he has only to think about a subject and the paint curls off. He is a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects he has few American peers." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Richard Powers' powerful and peculiar novel, Gain, is the largest compliment any author has paid to the American reading public in decades." --Thomas M. Disch, Washington Post Book World

"Gain consists equally of horizon-busting breadth of knowledge and excruciating depth of vulnerability...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." --Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Chicago Tribune

"Richard Powers has proven himself a visionary writer...Throughout Gain there are dreamy, uncannily accurate little paragraphs on the Promethean messianism of corporate America." --Greil Marcus, The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

"Subtle, provocative, and powerful...Richard Powers' deceptively simple and terrifyingly effective novel Gain says it better than anyone has in a long time: buyer beware." --Rick Moody, Voice Literary Supplement