Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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The complexity increases when the family splits: Cole follows her father into exile in Brazil, and Birdie stays with her mother, now on the lam from the Feds. An uprooted Birdie—who had struggled to be accepted as black back in Boston and now passes as white in a small New Hampshire town—becomes an increasingly rebellious participant in the rituals of Caucasian smugness and racial fear. Her quest to reunite her family leads to the book's climax.

Senna, a graduate of Stanford and the University of California at Irvine, writes essays as well as fiction about the conundrums of race (see Utne Reader, Sept.-Oct. 1998). “I work with the tension between the identity I've chosen—black—and the visible me,” she says. “I tell people that I'm Indian, Mexican, black, Irish, and English—and all they ever say is, 'You don't look black!' People always want to know what I really 'am.' I never answer; instead, I ask, 'Why do you need to know that?—which, after all, is the real question.”

RICHARD POWERS
Into the belly of corporate culture

In a sequence of six distinguished novels, 41-year-old Richard Powers has waded boldly into the most daunting modern dilemmas: the birth of mass culture and mass destruction; the fate of children in the modern world; the fate of consciousness itself in the cyber age. In Gain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), he works as both a historian of the American soul and an analyst of the American social psyche in the late '90s as he tells two intertwined stories: the rise of a fictional multinational corporation called the Clare Soap and Chemical Company, and the agony and outrage of an ordinary woman whose malignant ovarian tumor was brought on by Clare chemicals.

Laura Bodey's battle with Clare is set against a fast-paced but brilliantly detailed history of American business as seen from the vantage point of an enterprise that mutates from a tiny family shop in 19th-century Boston into a forbidding, globe-straddling giant. “I try to show the way a corporation talks, the voice a company develops to represent itself to the public,” says Powers. As Clare grows, that voice—revealed in the advertisements and PR documents with which Powers sprinkles the text—changes from Protestant piety into what he calls “the folksy, jargony, 'we-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourselves' language of modern marketing. What's scary is when that tone begins to be used to placate the public, not just sell things to them.” Powers also shows just how recent the modern concept of the corporation is—mid-19th-century businessmen saw issuing stock as a last-ditch and rather disreputable measure, out of keeping with good, thrifty business practice.

The Chicago-born Powers teaches a multimedia course at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, although he has been able to support himself with his writing since the success of his very first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), which he wrote while he was working as a computer programmer in Boston. In 1989 he was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. A six-year stint living and writing in the Netherlands followed; he returned to his home country, and home state, two years ago. What Powers calls “widely diverse reactions” to Gain have taught him a great deal about his readopted country. “It's been attacked for bad-mouthing business and it's been called the Great Republican Novel,” he says. “Business today is like religion; it's hard to think clearly about. By looking closely, what I want to give is a sense of how enormously rapidly the corporate culture has developed, that it wasn't always like this; that we created it and now it's creating us.”

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