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T H E_.S A L O N_.I N T E R V I E W
The author of "Gain" on cancer, corporations, the blankness of the Midwest and the elusive art of seducing readers. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY LAURA MILLER | How much would you sacrifice for a substantially reduced risk of cancer? Makeup, clean clothes, cheap bug-free food, antiperspirants, automatic dishwashers, mosquito repellent, medicine, indoor toilets, electricity? Richard Powers' new novel, "Gain," braids together the fates of two entities: Laura Bodey, a divorced, 42-year-old mother of two who's dying of ovarian cancer, and the Clare Soap and Chemical Company, a 170-year-old multinational corporation that owns Lacewood, Ill., the town where Laura lives and was, perhaps, poisoned. One story is about relentless decline, the other about relentless ascent, but they're both about gain, the awe-inspiring, inhuman capacity for growth shared by both capitalism and cancer. "Gain" needles us with a persistent question: Is it possible to separate the two? Powers has earned an as-yet-modest, but devoted readership (David Foster Wallace has called him one of the greatest novelists working today) writing brainy, intricate novels drunk on the delights of thought itself. "Galatea 2.2" follows its narrator's recovery from a failed marriage as he participates in the construction of an artificial intelligence capable of passing a graduate exam in English. The characters in "The Goldbug Variations" burrow into the complexities of genetics, cryptology and the sublime architecture of Bach. These are novels of emotion as well as ideas, but they're primarily for people who care passionately about ideas themselves. Readers with a serious Richard Powers jones love that his books leave them both dazzled by his hushed, pristine prose and richer in understanding about the roots and frontiers of human knowledge. With "Gain," Powers turns his attention to a subject both ominous and pervasive, but one seldom dealt with by contemporary fiction. What inspired "Gain"? It grew out of two sources. The personal story arose out of the deaths of five people very close to me, within the last eight years, by cancer, and this very local sense that we're living in the middle of an epidemic of our own devising. The second is a bit more abstract. I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation. Looking at my old books, I see a restlessness of theme -- photography, genetics, music, pediatrics, artificial intelligence -- but there was a kind of lurking presence behind these topics that I wasn't addressing, or acknowledging in any overt way. It's the rhinoceros at the table that no one was talking about -- and that's business, that's markets, that's incorporation. The more I've thought about that, the less satisfying the literary approach to commerce and manufacture has been. There have been wonderful books on those themes, but it's considered a kind of subclassification of literature, when in fact, it's really the center of our existence here as social man. That indicates that there's a bit of evasion going on. It seemed worth trying to join those two sources into a book that really asks, "Where are we and why are we and how did we get here?" without resorting to finger pointing, vilification and externalizing the costs. That's how I came up with the idea of writing what's basically a dialogue between two people: a 42-year-old woman with cancer and a multinational corporation, who under the laws of the United States is considered an individual, with due process and all the rest. Business may not be thought of as a major topic for contemporary literature, but some people say that the story of the novel is in many ways the story of capitalism. Did you find it difficult making that overt rather than implicit? Well, sure. Because you think initially that it's not inherently a dramatic subject. Yet, the more that I read the history of particular companies -- Proctor & Gamble, Colgate, Lever, all the rest of them -- the more I thought, my God, this is Shakespearean. I often felt in researching the particulars of these corporate histories, no, you can't do that in fiction; that's too good, it's too rich, it's too ironic. But I know what you mean about the novel always being implicitly about these subjects anyway. In fact, one reader said that if you removed the corporate-history half of "Gain," you end up with a domestic story that's very much like a certain kind of late '80s, if not minimalist, at least very domestic fiction. Except for the fact that Laura Bodey's life then has to go to the source and find out why it looks the way it does. I think that's the key difference. Yes, novels are what they are both as the result of the privilege of increasing wealth and increasing ability to manipulate matter, but they're also recoiling, in a sense, from acknowledging their sponsor, or identifying it in any way. Did you pick a particular corporation to sort of use as your model for Clare? It's a kind of creature with a mind of its own. It is a creature, the kind of aggregate life that arises out of accident, accretion, law, peculiarities of circumstance. It grows from three Boston merchants who exploit an Irish immigrant to get the secret of soap-making until it's this huge aggregate where no one's pulling the strings anymore, and the CEO is following the inertial lead of this mass. I think that's very much the history of America. We have created this life that once did our bidding and now is calling the shots. As far as researching, I went to several consumer-product companies, not all agricultural chemistry companies or soap manufacturers. The company that I created is itself a kind of aggregate of corporate histories. Hoping I don't get sued. Or hoping I do, I don't know. This company just builds itself and takes any setbacks and devours them and digests them and turns them into advantages. Which makes it a weirdly gripping story, kind of like those Victorian novels where the character slowly makes his fortune through different travels or adventures. Laura's story was the end result of the whole Clare story. She is the arrival. She harvests the rewards and the punishments. At one point she looks at the stuff in her house and realizes that Clare is implicated in every single thing she owns. Like termites. So she can't say, "You get out of my life, because you've given me cancer," because -- You are my life, you've made my life. I'm afraid of taking that position in some ways. The centrist is going to catch hell from both ends of the spectrum. To say that markets, that commerce gives with one hand and takes away with the other is to not satisfy anyone, or to potentially alienate everybody. But it seems to me true, finally. I don't think that's defeatist and, in fact, in some ways it's a necessary first step toward intelligent activism. Externalization, vilification, saying, "We're decent human beings and this CEO of Dow Chemicals is out to get us," isn't really historically informed. It's not really coming to terms with the size and scale and scope of the problem. And in some ways -- not to get too subtle or theoretical -- it's that attitude that channels alienation and makes people continue to lead the lives that they've been leading. How so? Well, it makes it seem as if everything would be fine if the guy at the top wasn't being greedy or trying to poison us. We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is. These things are the realizations of our desire to conquer matter and time and to live on our own terms, and it behooves us to look at the degree to which we can't have life on our own terms and the attempt to do so is deeply poisoning and alienating. I'm not saying that Laura is the cause. I'm not trying to blame the victim. I'm trying to say we're all in this together. She certainly resists blaming anyone throughout most of the book. You said that you've known five people who have died of cancer in the last eight years. Do you see links between their illnesses and environment contamination? I guess that question can't be answered with scientific definitiveness. Were their situations as clear-cut as living in a town with a big chemical company and a higher-than-normal rate of cancer? Well, I happen to think that that is the case in Champagne County [Illinois, where Powers lives]. But the story demonstrates how complicated that question is as well. I wanted to historicize the trajectory of Clare so far back to show that the disease is older than the release of carcinogens recognized by the EPA into the air and water. This transformation, the commodification of life, is a much longer process. The point is not to reduce the hazards of industrialization to one particular industrial disease, but to say that all the consequences of our lives have somehow been ransomed to this process. The story of Clare does cast a certain spell, though. It has the excitement of something coming into existence. I wanted to create a company that would be the outgrowth not just of the profit motive or greed. See, this is where I think there's a kind of flattening in the way that we ordinarily look at the consequences of capitalism. Those motives are certainly there, but I see the works of collective humanity in commerce as reflecting the real diversity and conflict and ambivalence that underwrites a much broader spectrum of human emotion. You have simple ingenuity as a motivation, a sort of religious zeal, a kind of nationalistic fervor. You have all of this contributing to "Hey, let's make this thing work and let's give the people what they need." A bit like, "Let's put on a show!" Very much so. Let's make something that's bigger than us. And that's why it's dishonest of us to say that we want to live the way we live, and yet we want to identify all the problems as a result of some particular person's greed. In fact, while we may have created industrial diseases, soap eradicated more extensive and horrendous health hazards than we can even remember. A parallel to Laura's ovarian cancer is the fact that when doctors started washing their hands before they delivered babies, that alone saved so many lives. That's right. It makes the calculation of local decisions incredibly complicated. Which may not be a welcome message. N E X T+P A G E+| Creating cross-gender characters - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLIE POWELL |
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