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Avg. Rating: 4
Requires some patience, but well worth it
I have always felt that the best novels are not the ones that you consume like candy, devouring page by page, but the ones that consume you - quietly, slowly, unexpectedly, filling you up a day at a time. I finished The Echo Maker over a week ago, and I still feel like I am living with the characters, who are so real, so flawed, and so alive that you find yourself despising and forgiving every one.
Don't be scared away by Powers' reputation for tackling heady, difficult subjects - I didn't always understand the science here, but it didn't impede my reading experience at all. You'll walk away from this enlightened, more curious about the workings of the human brain, and you'll be rewarded with a fantastic story. This is a rich novel - not flawless by any means, but tragic, hopeful, and humane, and well deserving of the National Book Award. This is the first Powers novel I've read, I can't wait to go back and read more.
This is surely one of the best novels of 2006!
It's late February on the Platte River, outside Kearney, Nebraska, 130 miles west of Lincoln. One of the greatest spectacles of nature is in progress. "Half a million birds--four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth--home in on the river. They trace the Central Flyway, an hour-glass laid over the continent.
"A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on asphalt, one broken scream and then another rouse the flock. The truck arcs through air, corkscrewing into the field. Mark Schluter, 27, had flipped over on the shoulder of North Line Road, and had lain pinned in his cab, almost frozen by the time paramedics found and freed him."--From Part One, The Echo Maker
So begins Richard Powers' remarkable novel, "The Echo Maker," a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award.
When Mark emerges from a coma, his brain injury has triggered delusions known as Capgras syndrome, a condition in which loved ones or eve a person's own reflection are perceived to be imposters.
Mark's two buddies, Tommy Rupp and Duane Cain, deny knowing anything about the skid marks of three vehicles on North Line Road.
Mark is uncomfortable around everyone, except a nurse's aide named Barbara Gillespie, a highly intelligent woman who seems overqualified for her menial job.
Desperate to find help for her brother, Karin Schluter enlists the help of Dr. Gerald Weber, a New York cognitive neurologist who is famous for his case histories describing the bizarre world of brain disorders.
Weber, who has devoted his life to separating the rational from the irrational, has published three popular books about how the brain works (and often doesn't work): The Three-Pound Infinity, Wider Than the Sky, and The Country of Surprise.
Shaken by his encounter with the Capgras patient, and with his latest book panned by critics, Weber's confidence in "pure science" wavers. He begins to wonder if his entire career has been nothing more than self-serving, exploitive psychobabble.
Reading The Echo Maker is a disorienting experience. Powers makes us suspect that Mark Schluter is different from the rest of us only in degree, not in kind. Are not we, like Mark, searching for cosmos amidst the chaos, for "any passage that may lead forward out of permanent confusion."
We wonder, What exactly is mind? What exactly is consciousness? We begin to doubt the solidity and continuity of the self, which is ever shifting like quicksilver, ever changing like a chameleon.
In a parallel subplot, Powers introduces us to Karin's boyfriend, environmentalist Daniel Riegel, who helps us appreciate the millions of years of evolution that has led to a remarkable profusion and proliferation of life forms.
Daniel struggles against highly funded consortiums to preserve the water of the shrinking Platte River ("a mile wide and an inch deep"), on which the sandhill cranes depend for survival. As Thoreau put it, "In wildness is the preservation of the world."
As the novel progresses, the Platte becomes more than a backdrop for Schluter's horrific accident and Riegel's heroic efforts; it is a powerful metaphor for the mix of solidity and fragility in all living things.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Schluter's progress toward self-integration, which has a ripple effect on those around him. Forced to scrutinize their beliefs and lifestyles, Karin, Dr. Weber and others, start to fall apart.
Richard Powers is the author of eight previous novels: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dinner; Prisoner's Dilemma; The Gold Bug Variations; Operation Wandering Soul; Galatea 2.2; Gain; Plowing the Dark; and The Time of Our Singing. He has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction.
The Echo Maker is a thinking person's novel. Powers turns us every which way but loose, and shakes up our old certainties. It is a remarkable novel, in both style and substance.
Capgras Syndrome
The trouble with "The Echo Maker" is the central plot device-- Mark's disorientation after his accident, his Capgras Syndrome. He can't recognize his sister. He knows his girl, his chums, even his dog but not Karin, his sister. His condition may be a real syndrome, but here it is not credible. We say "Come on!" The novel is an improvement over his last, but the plot hangs by a weak thread.
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