On the soapbox

Richard Powers's novel of industry, illness, and the problem of culpability

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 7, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

In ``Galatea 2.2,'' a cyber-update of the Pygmalion myth and arguably his best novel, Powers even managed to be tender: Imagine a computer-protagonist named Helen, whose heroic defense of literature actually brings tears to the eyes. ``Gain'' enjoys such poignancy only occasionally, though such moments are frequent enough to make one hang in to the end. By turns ambitious, wrenching, and downright dull, this is a novel whose ironic subtitle could be ``A Social History of Soap.'' Along with the birth of mass-marketed hygiene, it manages to take on business and labor history, commerce, urban development, the birth of the railroads, philanthropy, and better living through chemistry. Oh, and one of the darker miracles of the modern world: chemotherapy.

Swimming in factoids with a tragic theme running throughout, ``Gain'' is about American progress and its nonchalant evils -- the story of the rise of a little soap company, born in Boston in the 1830s, transformed into an international behemoth of the modern age. The novel is also, just as unstoppably, the story of Laura Bodey -- a 42-year-old real estate agent in Lacewood, Ill., gardener, mother of two, a woman with ``no problem that five more years couldn't solve.'' The five years will be the problem. Resident of the same little town that houses Clare International's Agricultural Division headquarters, Laura is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. How she got that way -- whether Clare is responsible, legally liable, even morally identifiable, in its corporate anonymity -- is the suspense tale woven through ``Gain.'' But the novel spends most of its time tracing the history of Clare Soap and Chemical, familiarly known to Lacewood simply as ``Clare'' -- an idea born of two enterprising brothers and an Irish candlemaker, with the simple notion that, if cleanliness was indeed next to godliness, it could also be delivered for a price.

This overriding metaphor of ``Gain'' is justifiably dark, delineating as it does the hidden costs and cruelties of unchecked corporate growth, of products that promised a better life. From bar soap to napalm, in other words, with stock options for everybody involved, while Laura only has to look around the house to count her dividends: cleaners and hairsprays and window coating and linoleum and wallpaper, all triumphs of Clare. But following this arc, from the Clare brothers' first business ventures to the nameless monolith of the 1990s, reveals not so much the course of nefarious greed as the story of America itself. The mercantile capitalism of the 19th century soon enough had to contend with westward expansion, several depressions, the Civil War, a newly industrialized nation, and the rise of the labor movement; in one struggling form or another, Clare was there for all of it. When Benjamin Clare, the third brother and moral conscience of the family, is killed by his own well-intentioned experiments with anesthesia, the mishap seems emblematic as well as foreboding. Only the good die trying.

``Gain'' is an impressive synthesis of this swatch of history that made America huge, but at times it's also boring. Powers's tirades about commerce and alkaloids and international diversification seem as unchecked as Clare itself; the mind spins even as it wearies. This is a Powers trait: In ``Galatea 2.2,'' he pontificated endlessly, but his subjects were literature and the nature of intelligence, and it was a gorgeous choreography of insight and knowledge. Here, the endless stream of information is less ethereal and more historical; less imbued with the wistful wisdom that dominated ``Galatea 2.2,'' and more driven by skeptical revisionism. So when Powers rips through the end of agrarianism or the rise of limited-liability laws, one is admiring, but exhausted. The history of commerce may be a fascinating subject to a lot of people -- I am not one of them -- but it hardly seems fitting to give it an imaginary anti-hero and call it fiction.

On occasion, Powers's dead-on insights can have the terse impact of a revolver. He gets modern malaise in a sentence: ``Ease upped the ante on the whole notion of existing.'' More compelling than these cerebral fortune cookies, though, is Laura's story -- relegated to the shadowlands behind Clare, both in Lacewood and in ``Gain.'' Her cancer, of course, mirrors the ascent of the industry that probably gave it to her: reproducing endlessly and mindlessly, eventually sacrificing the host. And her struggle takes on the ordinary cast of humanity's endless hope-tinged days: her quarrelsome relationship with her ex-husband, her son's disappearance into cyber-comfort, her daughter's angry efforts both to love and lose her. When Laura leaves the sanctuary of her wheelchair long enough to make a snow angel, the moment has more impact than 50 pages of Clare's rise to faceless tyranny.

``People want everything,'' Laura whispers to her daughter from her hospital bed. ``That's their problem.'' ``Gain'' may not take any prisoners in its assault on corporate America, but part of the force of its argument is that all of us -- Laura Bodeys, every one -- have been cheerful, sometimes unwitting, foot soldiers for the captains of industry. If the same folks who brought us rubber tires and household cleaners were also capable of Agent Orange, blessed few of us attempted a real cost analysis until it was too late.

And if some company got together, came up with something for her, for what has happened, some fruit-scented spray that would return her to all those blissful, carefree assumptions: well, they could name their price. Cancer-Be-Gone. She'd sell just about anything but the kids to get it. If the cure lasted for only, say, ten years, at the end of which the vendor wanted the most unthinkable item in trade, she'd still sign.

She cannot watch television now, even old movies. The radio is a painful shaggy-dog joke. Magazines and newspapers know what has happened to her, and they bait her with page after page of full-color burlesque. Her own kids now seem like walking billboards to her, their legible clothing proclaiming Kiss Me, I'm Current, I'm Knowing, I'm Pliant, I'm Lost.

She never knew what this place really looked like while she was living in it. Now that she lives elsewhere, she cannot believe what she sees. Once you learn a new word, it's everywhere. The world is a registered copyright.

RICHARD POWERS, from ``Gain''