Echo Maker

Pulitzer Prize nominee, I thought it had to be great. I read 2-3 books every week, and it took me a month to get through this. Tedious, boring, flat characters and to me, pointless. I don’t have any idea what people are raving about. Flashbacks to an acclaimed neurologist…why? What did his musing matter to this book? The characters were all undeveloped. One pops in an out through out the book about 20 times, and I had no idea why until the last 10-15 pages. I hate this book and hate that I wasted my time in it.

I am reading The Prisoner's Dilemma because I wanted to read another of Powers' books. This author's work is probably not for everyone because of its depth, but for me it held the elements key to a winning work: it is thought-provoking, it has visual beauty that is portrayed through the written word, its strong characterizations are marvelous, and it has a message. More than one message is contained in this book and perhaps that can be faulted. For me, I was less interested in the most obvious, though timely message. I found the more enduring theme of relationships to be the thread that held the plot and the subplots together. Powers has matured as a writer, and I suspect subtlety to be a part of his continual growth as a writer. He shows off his raw intellect, which I suspect is greater than mine, but I think the best writers tone it down. From Prisoner's Dilemma to Echo Maker I believe I can see his evolution. I hesitated to read the book knowing that Capgras is an extremely rare condition. He pulls it off to great effect; however he rambles about neurologic phenomenon more than necessary. I skimmed some of these parts. Abstract philosophical digression at times detracted from the flow of the novel. It bogged down in the esoteric at times. Overall, I found the language breathtaking at times; the writer's intellect daunting; and this is one of the few books I felt enriched by reading. Because he presented a work that left me better than I was before I read the book, I give it my highest rating.

There are at least a half dozen mysteries at the heart of this fascinating novel, and at the end of its 450 pages, most of them get more or less satisfactorily solved - what really happened when a young man's truck goes off the road and nearly kills him; what prevents him from fully recovering his wits afterwards; and who wrote the note left at his hospital bedside? The one unsolved mystery is the mystery of the human brain itself and the tenuous belief an individual clings to that the self exists and can be known. Powers' book is a foray into the expanding field of neuroscience, whose discoveries reveal that brain functions do not always corroborate our sense of who and what we are. The central character struggles to make sense of a world that has suddenly gone haywire - at least from the perspective of everyone else - and he responds with increasing paranoia, as what he believes are secret conspirators replace the people and things that matter to him with replicas, the most significant of which is his sister, whom he takes for an imposter. Meanwhile, the novel introduces us to a range of other characters, whose identities undergo sea changes under the influence of a perfect storm of personality-altering stress. No one finally is exactly who they seem - especially to themselves. Along the way, we are brought to question our own easy assumptions about what seems like rock-solid, common sense reality. For the seriousness of its subject (the fragility of the human brain, the death of species, ecological collapse), the book can be immensely entertaining in the sparkling surface wit of its characters, almost never at a loss for comic repartee and raillery, providing a kind of gallows humor that sometimes had me laughing through tears, while I kept turning pages, anticipating the solving of all the mysteries in this wonderful, thought-provoking, moving novel.

Here is the best novel published in 2006. With The Echo Maker, Mr. Powers has written a novel that catapults him into the echelon of our best contemporary writers. And, truth to be told, he may well be remembered among those great, classic writers who are no longer with us, but whose works persist. There will be no story synopsis here, for it is best that one delves into this story cold. What I will say is that Mr. Powers has written a novel that tackles nothing less than to discern the core of what it means when one says "I am he (or she)." Its map is the human mind; it also courses along those other hidden tributaries known as emotion and reflex, instinct and memory. It's a curious amalgam for a novel: drama, mystery, scientific exploration, geographical representation, history, cultural investigation, and -- yes -- the migration of cranes. One of the most beguiling elements of this novel is that Mr. Powers manages to seam effortlessly scientific thought with a passionate and character-driven story. I have never been particularly adept at either math or science, yet Mr. Powers writes so beautifully -- and with such sharp cunning -- about the machinations of the human mind that I found the most esoteric elements of the prose not all that terribly difficult to follow. Above all, though, The Echo Maker is a gripping mystery; and, too, a love story. Love between people, as well as love for oneself (or, I should say, "one's self"). This is a challenging review to write, for its vagueness does apply. The novel rather reminded me -- in what some might discern as rather arcanely -- of Richard Russo's Empire Falls: a beautiful small-town story that, under the guise of a drama, reveals itself to be an entrancing mystery. As for the prose: gorgeous, glimmering, brimming with clarity. The characters are drawn impeccably; and, too, their inner landscapes are rendered just as acutely. As for the novel's pulse on what it means to live in a post-September 11th world: I've yet to see a writer capture so sharply -- and with utter conviction and importance -- what it means now to live in this country. To his credit, he does not approach the subject with arm-waving pedantics; rather, the theme of the story (what does it mean to be human; how can we ever known with certainty those we love, much less ourselves? [Fear, paranoia, resignation, will]) is suffused in every scene of the story itself. Quite an accomplishment. There may be people who begin this novel feeling somewhat bewildered (I did); however, that's the point of the novel: you must feel this displacement in order to better experience the situations that arise in the lives of the characters about whom you are reading. So, hang in there; amelioration is not too far off. While I read a number of good (The Road, Lisey's Story) and great (Everyman, The Lay of the Land) novels last year, The Echo Maker is the best. I finished it weeks ago and still its characters persist in my memory: the sign of a

Richard Powers stands as one of the best American novelists not receiving his fair share of popular attention. Our current culture of hyperbole makes problematic describing a creator of such extraordinary prose. His previous work includes some extraordinary pieces of work - Time of Our Singing which built a tale that braided race relations in America and music, Gain that examined the history of a corporation along with a very personal drama, and other brilliant works. Even Power's less successful works - Plowing the Darkness is one example - prove so audacious and thoughtful that they stand on a pedestal which most writers dream to touch. While his previous work has covered such diverse topics as the rise of the multinational, the evocative nature of music, and the history of soap, Power work always standout for his ability to distill thoughtful research into an understandable form and then weave it into his narrative structure. Echo Maker proves another demonstration of this gift, grappling with a host of metaphysical questions much pondered by modern neuroscience - what is the root of consciousness, how does our brain in all of its tremendous complexity work, what makes each of us who we are? Powers paints an evocative narrator to explore these issues, centering on the relationship between two siblings, a brother who suffers a tragic car accident leaving him functional but with a haunting form of mental damage and his sister who having fled from their home town returns to care for him. Into this stew of family trauma walks a noted scientist and popular writer -- clearly based on Oliver Sacks - who provides a window into understanding the strange malady suffered by the Mark, the brother. Of course being a Powers' novel, one also finds woven in a number of other seemingly disparate, but carefully tied other subjects, such as the migration of water fowl, the environment, and the evolution of the American Midwest. Readers who have enjoyed his earlier work will surely take considerable pleasure in Echo Maker. As for those unfamiliar with his work, they will doubtless move from here to the previous novels of this extraordinary talent.