Echo Maker

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Average customer rating 4.8 (5 comments)

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Richard Powers's award-winning novel is a double plot about crane migration that's told in a lyrical mode and neurological injury told in more didactic mode. Family drama, romance, environmental contests, and even a detective story also thread through these two main tales. The novel shows Powers's respect for the less-traveled parts of the US even as he shows the threats to them from brain drain and unsustainable development that ruins farming and crane habitat. The information about neuroscience will interest some and put off others. As will the characterization, which is the weakest part of the novel. The ending, however, will definitely surprise.

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This is a chilling story involving a brilliant neuroscientist whose self confidence and career are cracking; a young wastrel (Mark) in Nebraska who struggles to return to himself or some consistent, recognizable self, after a terrible car accident; Mark's sister (Karen), unrecognized by her brother and floundering between lovers and identities herself. There's also a mysterious medical aide, far too smart for her lowly caregiving position, intent on helping Mark, and an activist environmentalist intent on saving The Platte River valley to allow the ancient migration of cranes to continue. More delicious characters include a developer, and Mark's lowlife drinking buddies. This perhaps simplistic cast indicates that the story is character driven, but what I loved about it was a layering of metaphors linking the natural world to this troubled set of individuals. The theme is identity and the mind. Delicious reading.

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Plotwise, The Echo Maker is relatively simple; Mark Schluter, a twenty-something slacker from a small town in Nebraska, flips his truck in an accident on an icy stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. His older sister Karin, after years of trying to escape her roots, is brought back to care for him. But Mark, his brain damaged from the accident, displays symptoms of a rare syndrome known as Capgras; he believes that his sister has been replaced by a doppelganger or government spy. The story is at heart a mystery. The Schluters try desperately to piece together what happened on the night of Mark's accident, aided only by an enigmatic note left by Mark's bedside at the hospital. The mystery of the accident, though, is enclosed in a wider mystery: the mystery of consciousness, understanding, self. To that end Karin Schluter calls in a medical expert, Dr. Gerald Weber, a neurologist and writer who ends up facing his own identity crisis after being faced with Mark's. Powers' prose is dense and rich, and in some ways he writes like a modernist; there is the same interest in the fractured self, the same homage to the complexity of consciousness, the same intricate wordplay. If Woolf or Faulkner had a background in neurology, they might have explored territory similar to this. And then too there's the indelible touch of Hardy on the novel, the landscape-as-character, the way lives are determined as much by geography as by chemicals and hormones and genetics. Neurology, anthropology, zoology, psychology--there's a lot of heavy intellectual lifting in this book. Powers sifts his simple story through the scientific advances and ecological disasters of the last few decades. What you get is a narrative as knotty and variegated as mind itself. Some readers will be turned off by what will no doubt be called excesses, or by the labyrithine writing. It took me nearly three weeks to finish, but I was dazzled. If you are a reader who not only tolerates complexity but craves it, you are Powers' target audience. Challenge yourself to read this book.

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You'd have to look pretty far back, perhaps Tolstoy or Dostoyevski, for a comparable and engaging portrait of the human psyche, the way we see ourself (and possible selves) and the Self of others. Powers has us wandering round in the edifice of Self, as uncomfortable as though we were looking for a room we knew existed but couldn't find. In this one novel, he is alternately frightening and as humorous as if can get after one has been frightened.

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I love the work of Richard Powers because he combines reams of research (in this case on ecology and the latest neurological developments) with the most intricate of human emotions. In lesser hands, either could easily be lost. The Echo Maker is one part mystery, one part narrativized science, but the part that resonates the most with me is the quiet manifesto at its heart, about people's need for stories.