Volume 45, Number 20 · December 17, 1998
A Matter of Life and Death
By A.O. Scott
Gain
by Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 355 pp., $25.00
If, as Calvin Coolidge famously said, 'the chief business of the American people is business,' the response of most American novelists has been that it's none of theirs. While the tumultuous rise and global spread of American capitalism is surely a subject epic in scope and dramatic in detail, it is one that has inspired surprisingly few of our best writers. There has always been interest in the behavior of people who have money, but less interest in how money is made. Henry James, in The American, sketched a new type of character—the American entrepreneur—but found the merest mention of the commodity at the heart of his enterprise impossibly vulgar. The travails of workers have also received intermittent attention, but even the Proletarian writers of the 1930s had little to say about the production and distribution of the goods themselves. And while the manners and morals of businessmen figure in the work of writers from Sinclair Lewis to John Cheever, the business itself typically takes place offstage or in the background.
Review, 4268 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |