-So if I were recommending this book, it would come with a warning that a fair amount of this book is rage-inducing and saddening. We have two competing narratives. In one, we get the history of the development of a soap company beginning in the mid-19th century in the Northeast through the late 1990s. This begins with two brothers coming up with a process to mass-produce soap, to reduce the oily residue from glycerine, and then through the Gilded Age’s development of corporations (in the […]

The few negative reviews for this book suggest that it’s overly sentimental and light-weight. You could call it light-weight if you want, but I think that’s only really true in regards to other Richard Powers books. It’s probably his shortest, actually I am certain it is, but his next shortest Generosity, is the weakest of the one’s I’ve read. Instead, this book is oddly and sneakily bleak, as opposed to sentimental. I won’t fully explain that as it involves spoilers. The model of the book […]

An early Richard Powers novel (as in from 1988 before he was 30), about a family dominated by a loud, large, father. This novel is written from multiple viewpoints and narrators both third and first-person, and includes several short sections written from Powers’s voice dealing with the real life death of his father. This last part is something that Powers does from time to time, puts himself into his fiction, in fictional and not so fictional ways. The takes place primarily in the 1970s and […]

The first Richard Powers book I read was Galatea 2.2, and I read it in about 2001 or so. It’s more or less science fiction, but pulled back a little. It struck me later with other books that he does this a lot. He write scientific fiction, where he explores various scientific ideas and concepts within fiction, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes a little mechanically. This book, as you can tell, is a kind of Orpheus retelling. Richard Ells is an experimental composer influenced by the […]

I genuinely liked the writing in this novel a lot, and some of the thinking that went into it. It goes off in an unexpected direction about a third the way through that becomes the major source of plot for the novel, but I ended up thinking it was a lot less successful than the direction the novel seemed to be taking initially. We begin in Chicago where a burnt out writer and editor is beginning an adjunct job with a local small college teaching […]