Richard Powers is one of my favorite living novelists, but I’ve been finding one of his tics hard to understand. He routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he’s referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name almost becomes a distracting presence itself, or else he gives it a phony name. Just as an example, here’s a passage from very early in The Echo Maker:

She called her own employers, up in Sioux. They were a big outfit, the third-largest computer vendor in the country. Years ago, in the early days of the PC clone boom, they’d broken out of the pack of identical mail-order vendors on the simple gimmick of running herds of Holsteins in their ads. Mark had laughed at her when she’d dragged back to Nebraska from Colorado and got a job with them. You’re going to work complaints for the Cow Computer Company?

Now, obviously, he means Gateway. So obviously, in fact, that you end up sort of stopping and puzzling over this otherwise insignificant passage wondering: “Why does it describe Gateway in this much detail without just naming it?” The company is later portrayed as relatively unsympathetic when the protagonist wants time off to care for her injured brother, so maybe it’s something to do with avoiding lawsuits in that instance, though again, the description is unambiguous enough that it’s hard to see why the inclusion or omission of the name should matter much. And it doesn’t explain why, when a character later in the book looks something up on a site that is obviously Wikipedia, its name has been changed to “The People’s Free Encyclopedia.”

Precisely because Powers is so good at making his characters internally credible (though his Midwestern slaughterhouse mechanic does once or twice slip into incongruous locutions like “It simply never dawned on me…”) these moments are jarring, reminding you the world you’re moving through is fictional, though this doesn’t seem to be their purpose. One guess is that he wants to include the description for the sake of readers, present or future, for whom “Wikipedia” or “Gateway” might not mean anything, but worries that both naming and explaining something so familiar to so many readers would seem silly. Yet I can’t help thinking there’d be another way to accomplish that, if it were the point.

Update: Just after writing this, I realized that the simplest way to figure out why Powers does this would be… to ask him. As I should have guessed, the jarring or disorienting effect I mentioned is not some accidental side-effect, but precisely what he intended:

My decisions to omit or rename familiar real world institutions have a
variety of reasons that do vary with context. In general, though, I’m
driven by the desire for estrangement, a need to escape realism into
something parallel or not quite parallel. I really think that my novels are
much more metafictional than a lot of critics seem to think. The world of
the book is not exactly our world.

Part of the point is to stop and slow readers, to make them look again. So I
am especially delighted that you noticed, and that the device prompted your
thoughtful question.

Well, there you have it. Go read the man, if you haven’t.