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is a sacrament – gradually transform their enterprise
into an edifice, a being with a life of its own that will
thrive and survive beyond their lifetimes. Clare’s Sons
becomes Clare, then Clare Incorporated, its interests
and influence spreading across the land and around
the globe like the Gospel, like a prairie fire, like a fastgrowing
weed, like a cancer – or like all at once.
Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Laura Bodey is a divorced
mother and a successful real estate agent, an American
Everywoman whose daily concerns revolve around her
work and family: Is her son spending too much time
playing computer games? Is her daughter smoking pot?
How can she manage the uneasy truce with their father?
Will she make receive a Top Performers award again
this year? Though the days and years have flown by in a
blur of work, parenting, consumption, and more work,
with little time for Laura to realize her own dreams, the
Bodeys seem to have settled into a suburban idyll: Life
is comfortable if not perfect, and the future, although
unwritten, seems to promise more of the same. The
multiheaded hydra that Clare has become, however,
will change all that.
Where was the point where Clare’s Sons’ noble
enterprise became a destroyer of worlds, where the
company dedicated to cleanliness, quality, and purity
became a monster? The growth of Clare is an allegory
of the loss of innocence of a country and its people,
the story of the alchemical transformation of ideals into
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
avarice, of solemn vows into hollow public relations
pronouncements, of physical reality into vacant and
ephemeral imagery.
Gain is the story of the decline and fall of a company,
a family, and a nation rendered in quiet symbolism
and graceful, elegant prose. In lesser hands, the raw
materials of Gain could have easily been transmuted
into a soap opera or a shrill anti-corporate rant; instead,
Powers’ careful craftsmanship and almost obsessive attention
to linguistic nuance, to period detail, and to the
tiny but telling words, phrases, actions, and rituals that
make up the stuff of existence in 90s America render
Clare, the Bodeys, and their world in photorealistic
detail, giving Gain the feel of real life.
In the end, Gain is about losses, fiscal, physical and
spiritual: A woman who loses her health, a corporation
that loses its soul, and an emerging democracy
that loses its way en route to the promised land. Gain
is a modern American tragedy, and like all classic
examples of the form, its tragic heroes’ undoing occurs
as the result of a catalytic reaction between the
characters’ own hidden vulnerabilities and immense,
unseen forces greater than themselves; that these
are invariably ultimately recognized, once past the
point of salvation, is the classicist masterstroke that
imbues Gain, like a modern Richard III or Medea,
with monumental, timeless power. Is Gain really this
good? Yes. Yes. Yes. �
409
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