Soap as a Means of Grace

...In truth, these fashions do no lasting harm...

...This may be the ultimate Achilles heel of Infofiction in general, that its passion for info may not be matched by an affection for common humanity...

...Its purpose...

...resulted in [Clare's] shipping an additional 10,000 pounds of candles and soap around the Cape every two months...

...How strange it is that Richard Powers, a writer of great range, verbal resource, exquisite intelligence, and moral perception should write a novel in which the corporation, for all its corruption and obtuseness, shines more brightly than the people it destroys...

...All Samuel [Clare] ever wanted to do was change the rules of material existence...

...Cream everyone else...

...In The Gold Bug Variations (1991) it was genetic coding and the music of Bach, and in Galatea 2.2 (1995) it was robotics and neural networks...

...Such is the connection drawn by Powers between business and purity that one can well believe his case that soap was the morally-defining enterprise for a nation that saw purity in its dreams and had a conscience worthy of Lady Macbeth, always to be scrubbed, never to be cleansed...

...She seems, well, dumb...

...Did I hear the names Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, Thomas Pynchon...

...As the Indians were being driven off their land or exterminated, "Native remedies greased prosperity as much as did any machine oil...

...She is the ordinary woman rendered too ordinary for dramatization...

...One is a history of Clare, a soap manufacturing firm that two Clare brothers and an Irish tradesman founded early in the last century...

...I would not call Powers' history of soap always gripping...

...If fiction, in the short-lived rapture of philosophy, insisted not long ago on the irreparable break between the word and the world, it has since come back to earth with a vengeance, not simply through a new literature of experience, something our writers could always muster, but through the library...

...Strictly speaking, it doesn't need "things," but writers, editors and especially academics have such a sweet tooth for them that in the last 30 years we've seen our literature slither a broken course through a briar patch of brand names: Metafiction, Postmodernism, Magic Realism, Minimalism, and, for the academics, Multiculturalism...

...I am told that my commendation of Pears Soap has opened for it a large sale in the United States...

...The other plot is the story of Laura Bodey of Lacewood, the middle-American town that is home to Clare...

...Out behind the plant that manufactures "Germ-Guard" and "Clear-Thru" and "Colonial Cote" is a lake that will not freeze over even when the temperature dips to 40 below...

...Steven Millhauser...

...they even provide a comforting illusion of coherence to the incoherence of literature...

...I am willing to stand by every word in favor of it that I ever uttered...

...Gain is an environmentalist roman à thèse, though it rises above its tractarian origins by means of the author's brilliance in ferreting out the small print and getting the story told...

...writes Julia in a political editorial, and to be sure "the crushing of Mexico...

...it is too much the fever chart in prose—boom, bust, next boom, next bust—populated by characters who only occasionally step out of their textbook personae long enough to become believable...

...What we wind up knowing best about her is the nausea from chemotherapy...

...opening up all the drains—a general Jail Delivery, as it were, by which all impurity is driven from every part of the body...

...Some chapters of this novel sound like Paul A. Samuelson on economics, others call up The Physician's Desk Reference...

...She understands war as the health of the state, not to say of the corporation, and becomes an ardent propagandist for war with Mexico...

...One might cite also Andrea Barrett's science-based stories in Ship Fever, for which she won the National Book Award in 1996...

...By luck and by pluck, it has survived into the present as a vast conglomerate, a rival to Colgate, Lever Brothers and Procter and Gamble...

...Even Philip Roth, in his American Pastoral, takes us on a guided tour of glove manufacturing, from the tanning of skins to the sewing of "tranks...

...Virtually as old as the nation, Clare is, in Powers' telling, a scale model of America as a commercial civilization—from primitive entrepreneurialism to global integration, from honest sweat to deceptive huckstering, from family enterprise to limited liability corporation to multinational colossus, from Native Balm Soap, with its roots and resins, to All-Purpose Awe, with its treacherous petrochemicals...

...More spectacular examples might include David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with its impressive pharmacological savvy, and E. Annie Proulx' Accordion Crimes, a little encyclopedia of accordions and sudden death...

...The author, having set out to weigh the impersonality of a colossus against the humanity of a frail and decent woman, runs into a paradox: The colossus is not only all-devouring, despite environmental lawsuits that peck away at its hide like mosquitoes, but in the end is more interesting as well...

...author, "After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary American Jewish Imagination" When Minimalism gave up the ghost in the late '80s, roughly around the time Raymond Carver died and Richard Ford started writing full-blooded novels, American fiction was left momentarily without a "thing...

...The book is, rather, a succession of vivid moments, and Powers is never better than in his sharp exposures of the discrepancy between the cruelty of the young nation and its piety...

...The device for knitting the brilliant patches of the story together is a predictable and obvious cable stitch of two distinct plots...

...For whom was the continent meant, if not those most capable of developing it...

...To cleanse the multitudes and complete the journey of days...

...Companies everywhere sought their own brown font of patent elixirs: Kickapoo Kidney Cure, Choctaw Chew, Wrights' Indian Vegetable Pills...

...What that dream begets in the transition to modernity, as soap gives way to detergent and Clare's product line expands into furniture polish, fertilizers, beauty products—all things for home, garden—is toxicity...

...But character development is not the strong suit of Gain...

...Indeed, philosopher Henry Ward Beecher, employed by Clare's English rival, Pears, was an early example of celebrity product endorsement...

...But as she dies of cancer horribly, Laura does not quite exist for us except as the sum of her sufferings, her treatments, her incomprehension of everything that is going on...

...There are the stories, for example, of Joanna Scott, little parables of science and weirdness, and her recent novel Manikin, with its intricate descriptions of the art of taxidermy...

...A man must be fastidious indeed who is not satisfied with it...

...In his new novel, Gain, he has worked up an astonishing history of soap and through it a history of American capitalism as well as a detailed knowledge of chemotherapy...

...Is this merely boy stuff, or has Tim internalized the capitalist ethic...

...she seems to rise up off the page and into our hearts only at moments when her life becomes too painful to bear...

...Just as in reality it commandeers the air, me water, the earth, and the profits of labor, so in the book it commandeers the story's vitality...

...Thus it is the deep and bitter irony of Gain that an industry founded on dreams of cleanliness for the masses should become a polluter of the earth...

...The novelist is now a researcher, out there taking notes and keeping cardfiles like a scholar, and none is more devoted to the info side of Infofiction than Richard Powers...

...The story of Laura Bodey should have been the counterfoil to this corporate success story gone haywire...

...Oddly, and significantly, she is frequently upstaged by her son Tim, who is cyber savvy and is addicted to online computer combat with other boys his age...

...How different from the Clare CEO a hundred years later who declares, "Our line is desire...

...If cleanliness is next to Godliness," Ward is quoted as saying, "soap must be considered as a means of Grace, and a clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend soap...

...From his very first book, Three Farmerson Their Way to a Dance (1985), he has shown a fascination with intricate arcana...

...Laura, a divorced mother of two, discovers that she has ovarian cancer and comes slowly and grudgingly to the realization that it is environmentally caused, that Clare has been poisoning the air, the water and the ground of Lacewood...

...We respond to Laura Bodey with pity and terror and writhe in her agonies, yet finally do not really care very much to know her...

...And for defining an age or setting a curriculum, we still have no substitute...

...One who does stand out among the cavalcade of entrepreneurs, chemists and hucksters is Julia Clare, wife of the founding father, Resolve Clare...

...Be first to the cosmos...

...Build the best civilization...

...The new thing these days is Infofiction, writing that is part storytelling and part textbook, or sometimes one part storytelling and two parts textbook...