Customer Reviews

The Echo Maker

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

I always jump on a new Richard Powers novel as soon as it comes out in paper. However this time I was a bit anxious because `The Echo Maker' had won the 2006 National Book Award. If you want to see what I mean, go to the NBA's Web site (http://www.nationalbook.org/) and see how many of the past winners you've read, enjoyed, or even heard of. For some reason the NBA normally goes to some incredibly boring jeremiad on the angst of being a middle class white man in America. While `The Echo Maker' is thankfully not that, it is my least favorite of all of Mr. Power's novels.

I'm not sure why literary critics like books like this. The plot is interesting and weaves, in Mr. Powers' normal fashion, elements of life, science, and philosophy in an articulate manner. However in his past books I always had the feeling that Mr. Powers really had a gut understanding of the science and was able to reflect on it in such a way as to make us see the relevance to everyday lives; this is not the case with `The Echo Maker.' You more or less get the feeling that the science, neurophysiology in this case, was a `cut and paste' from Web sites. Also at least some of the information about Sandhill Cranes, an important part of the plot, was either out of date or misinformed.

Having said all this I still recommend this book for many reasons. Richard Powers is in my opinion, one of the very best novelists writing in America today. His work is solid and will stand the test of time. Why his much superior previous works were not given the attention of this one I attribute more to the strange tastes of the literati than to Powers' talent. Obviously some Amazon readers really liked this book and one review said the important thing to me; if this is the first Richard Powers' book you read it will likely make you want to read more.

Is the self a smooth continuity of being, or a patchwork that shifts and rearranges to create an illusory but convincing image of unbrokenness? Exactly how reliable are our perceptions of our surroundings and experiences? Are human beings constitutionally unable to harmonize and harness their cognitive powers to the needs of the ecosystem that sustains them? If science's hypothesis that consciousness arises from organic brain function is true, where does that leave us spiritually?

THE ECHO MAKER considers these and other hefty questions within the framework of a sophisticated story about a young Nebraska slaughterhouse machine mechanic, Mark Schluter, who suffers head injuries when his truck overturns at eighty miles an hour. When he awakens from a coma, his only surviving family -- his sister -- is a stranger to him. This is not a case of "typical" amnesia. He remembers his sister, but he feels no affinity or love for, no connection to, the woman in his hospital room who looks like her. He has the same impostor feeling about his faithful dog. Diagnosed with the extremely rare condition called Capgras syndrome, he soon attracts the attention of world-renown cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber, who comes to interview and test Mark.

As the novel progresses, Mark, sister Karin, and Gerald grapple with dissolving and re-forming self images. Mark's deficit evolves over a year's time, so Capgras doesn't become his only claim to fame in the medical literature. But perhaps even more interesting are the psychological convulsions that jolt Karin and Weber as they react to Mark's rearranging personality.

We meet Weber's wife, two buddies of Mark's, the men in Karin's life, a nurse's aide who makes an indelible impact on just about everyone. And we become awed voyeurs as masses of majestic, migrating cranes rest stop on the fading river near small town Kearney from Valentine's Day until about St. Patrick's. All play important roles in the measured, dense unwinding of THE ECHO MAKER.

Also at the heart and soul of the plot is a mysterious, nearly mystical message in a spidery scrawl Karin finds by Mark's hospital bed that begins "I am No One" and continues "GOD led me to you / so You could Live...." Who wrote it? Was it someone who saw the accident and can tell Mark why he swerved off the road? Does it transmit some transcendent meaning to and for the characters?

Having read Richard Powers' PLOWING THE DARK, I'm familiar with his techniques of welding at-first-glance-unrelated subjects together. THE ECHO MAKER achieves an amalgamation earlier and with more impressive effect. Nevertheless, after both books, I felt emotionally distanced. It is as if the author's cerebral strivings smother other potential gifts to the reader. There is an arty unreality to some of the conversations and situations in ECHO: for example, the "cute" shorthand between Weber and his wife can be cloying and patience-testing (although, overall I did enjoy their marital bond). Furthermore, Power's language leans to the pretentious and flirts with narrative hyperventilation in places.

In THE ECHO MAKER, the basic plot, somewhat on the lean side for a book of 451 pages, is elaborated by educational information about cranes, myriad cognitive disorders, water politics, and the stream of self-absorbed intuitions of the main characters (who aren't particularly sympathetic individuals). While the leisurely pace of the characters' self-discovery and the plethora of technical and natural detail can be attributed to thoroughness of exploration, less might have been more. Smart, layered, skillfully subtle novels deserve wider readership. But they often don't gain that wider audience...perhaps because authors write 450 pages where fewer could suffice.

This novel is, at its heart, a study of consciousness: its determinants as defined by the scientific community; the suffering caused when its "normal" template is cracked or irreparably shattered by biological change; how any of us might, through mid-life crisis or other personal shakeup, face psychological realignment of our precious "selves." The novel also reminds us that the human race, as the earthly species with dominant brains/minds, is running out of the luxury of time to make decisions that will either cooperate with or decimate our environment and fellow living creatures. And we are reminded that even if the mind is a product of the brain, life is a wonder. As one character puts it, "Everything dances."

Yes, this is a exhaustive and magniloquent volume. It is also an unusual, intellectually invigorating novel, and a very worthy endeavor. Please give it a go.

At times this book fascinated me as a psychological/psychiatric mystery, along the lines of Oliver Sachs' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", and when engrossed in those passages I couldn't put the book down. And then, Powers bogged everything down with the cranes and the dynamics of Weber's marriage and Karin's emerging doubts about her own identity, and I wanted to scream "get on with it!!!" While I did finish the book, it was only by speed-reading the final hundred or so pages to confirm my suspicions about who the mystery "Guardian" truly was. Disappointed to say that I sort of had it figured out, and was hoping for a conclusion more stunningly challenging. Others have complained about the lack of character development, and I have to agree - the characters are either stereotypical (as with Daniel the environmentalist) or merely there as props for plot advancement (Karsh, Barbara, et al). With those caveats, it was still an interesting read along the way, especially in the discussions of brain fractionalization. Recommended, with caution.

The other low star reviews have totally nailed it. Stephen's was great. Please consult them before you buy this book! I bought it on the strength of some media reviews and the National Book Award and felt like other reviewers that we couldn't have read the same book. Everything happens in the first 50 pages, but it goes on for 400 more. The writing is pretentious and phony. The characters really get on your nerves as the book goes on and on and on.... There's waaay too much backstory about the Weber character, his annoyingly menschy wife Sylvie (they address each other as Man! Woman! Husband! Wife!), their lesbian daughter Jess, their sex life...yada yada. He touches on some interesting concepts about the brain, consciousness, and identity, but you get tired of it when Mark doesn't recognize Karin for the umpteenth time and goes through the same "what did you do with my sister?" routine. The Mark character is wildly inconsistent - it's hard to believe that a twentysomething who works at a meatpacking plant, plays video games at an expert level, spent his pre-accident life customizing a Dodge Ram truck, and enlisted in the National Guard with little forethought -- obviously intended to paint a white-trash, dead-end personality profile -- would be capable of spouting off an articulate and insightful analysis of his sister's psyche, for example. He's all over the place and it really strains credulity. Powers wants to write about working class people, but he has to put words in their mouth that they would never say for expository purposes. I suppose the whole mystery about "the note" and the Barbara character kept me going, but it completely fizzles and you don't even care by the time you get there. He seemed to really go off the rails at the end into some experimental, free-form style where I got a little lost as to who he was talking about and what was happening, but admittedly I was counting the pages to the finish line at that point. I liked the part about the cranes, but unfortunately, they don't say much. I read literary fiction, appreciate Powers' talents, have some understanding of what he was trying to do, and enjoyed some of it, but it took me forever to get through this book and I just don't think it was worth the ride.

Having read the Amazon readers' reviews, I can tell I'm going to get flamed for this. But I am truly confused. Did these people read the same book I did? To me, it read like an airport/beach book in hack prose with arty bits about the annual migration of certain cranes thrown in. The story was just an excuse to wax philosophical about ecology, neurology and the sense of the self. The characters were mostly wax figures, dummies in a crash test.

The plot, if you can call it that, can generally be described as follows: Young man "Mark" has terrible accident in a truck and suffers brain damage. When he wakes up from a coma, he believes that his sister "Karin", his dog, his house are all imposters, and that this is part of some conspiracy, the nature of which he never figures out. These are apparently symptoms of something called "Capgras syndrome," a neurological disorder that causes its victims to believe such things. None of the medical professionals in the book has ever seen this in a trauma victim. A famous neurologist "Weber" is consulted. He comes, examines Mark, performs a few tests and leaves. Karin, who gives up a job as a customer service rep (!), moves in with a man she used to know, who is currently a vegan environmentalist hippie who meditates a lot, and who was Mark's best friend growing up. There is a corresponding plot line about environmentalism versus real estate development - which will probably end badly for the cranes and the hippies. Weber returns a few times. Karin sleeps with the hippie and with another guy as well. Also, there's a character who's a nurse and has secrets to keep (revealed later, but by that time, who cares?). Eventually Mark takes medicine and is restored to sanity. More or less.

There are so many things wrong with this novel, I don't know where to begin. Among other problems, there is very little character development. The sister seems like a big self-hating baby who lives a totally uninteresting life - probably because she is basically a not very interesting person. Her neurotic suspicion, that she has no personality, arises from the apparent fact that she does, in fact, have no personality to speak of. To the extent that her character is described, she appears to be an excruciating whiner.

The character she sleeps with, "Daniel", is a straw man - he barely speaks or shows any emotion whatsoever (the reader is told occasionally about Daniel's emotions, but they are never demonstrated or shown). His entire purpose seems to be a listening board to Karin's self-pitying, soporific patois. Everything we know about Daniel, we know because the narrator told us. Nothing is shown; only told. Daniel doesn't do anything and barely speaks till the end, and even then it's mundane and totally overwhelmed, in any event, with Karin's relentless self-pity.

Related to the author's inability to show rather than tell is that the author's characters - and the whole plot, actually - really only exist as a scaffolding for the author's musings on environmental devastation and what neurology can teach us about the sense of self. But the environmental statement is something most of us already know (real estate development is bad for migrating birds), and Oliver Sacks already told us about the fragile self in his many popular books. In fact, the character Weber is a Sacks doppelganger. We're told he goes through a lot of anguish after receiving bad reviews on his latest book.

Moreover, this book is excessively slow. Most of the time we're in the characters' heads thinking thoroughly banal thougts because that's all they have in them to think about. I stuck with it though to the end, and I can confidently say that the author did not redeem himself at the end. Mark's recovery is mentioned and never referred to again. I can't even remember what happened to most of the other characters, and it's only been a week since I finished the book.

I cannot emphasize enough how amazingly bad this book is. And keep in mind: if you read this, you'll never get that time back. Don't waste it.

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.

Great concept, some brilliant passages, great plot, until....it gets repetitive, overstuffed with medical jargon, characters start to act out of character, and the plot becomes cliche, etc. In other words, until it disintegrates. However,there is a momentum that carries through, so I was glad I finished it.
Bottom line, Cannot BELIEVE this was a finalist for National Book Award. I wouldn't recommend it unless you love this writer.

You will love this book if you are fascinated by cranes, still enjoy playing doctor, or are taking a writing class. The book opens with self-consciously poetic language about cranes, "ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. . . the air red with calm." The cranes are symbols, of course, but of what is not clear. At least in one instance a crane stands in for a horny old man trying to dance. Another causes coitus interruptus, but of humans, not cranes. When all is said and done, they symbolize water. But what that means is not entirely clear.

The doctor is not just any old quack but a specialist in Neuroscience. So you get to play with terms like Capgras and whether it can "help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind." This possibility is backed up with dozens of anecdotes about brain damaged people that would normally be found in books by Oliver Sacks, who seems to be the model for one of the characters. Fortunately, the cases have very little to do with the plot or the characters, but they do add interest to to an other wise dull story.

For the student of writing, the book is full of metaphors and similes, all worthy of analysis, but few that enhance the book. Arms and legs snake out of a robe like fresh mistakes. He looked like a bleached garden gnome. He rose up in her dreams like grass after a prairie fire. Nostrils quiver at least twice, a nose and neck tendons at least once. Almost every page offers similar oddities that a budding young writer would enjoy playing with.

Cranes, brain jargon, and semi-poetic prose dominate the book. The book's only weaknesses are a sensible plot and characters you care about.

Where to start? How in the wide world did this heap of literary confusion warrant a National Book Award? What could have been a compelling mystery-driven plot is soured by poor dialogue, cartoonish characters with unbelievable quirks and motivations, and a profusion of overwrought similes and metaphors. A description of approaching verbal conflict between lovers: "They'd get onto thin ice within minutes, then stay out there, spinning arm and arm, a whole pairs freedance routine." That's just bad. I kept with it, thinking that the payoff of the solved mystery would make it all worthwhile. It doesn't.

I, too, had been looking forward to reading this book. I became a Richard Powers fan when I read "The Gold Bug Variations," which I found to be brilliant and compelling. My fandom waned when I read two more of his books that I found impenetrable and slogging. When I heard that "Echo Maker" had won the National Book Award, I was very excited to think that Powers was back in top-notch form.

The truth, as it so often does, turned out to take the middle road. The book has many fine elements--its concern for its characters, for the environment, for the future--and its exploration of what consciousness may be.

That said, the characters never seemed real to me, especially their dialogue. They seemed more to be symbols manipulated by the author to discuss the issues he's concerned with rather than real people talking. And, though on an intellectual level I cared about what happened to them, in the end I never emotionally connected with them or was concerned by the outcome of the book. I finished it mostly out of a sense of duty rather than being compelled by it.

Richard Powers is obviously an intelligent man and a unique stylist. He likes wordplay which is sometimes fun and sometimes intrusive in the narrative.

If you've never read him before, I'd recommend the "Gold Bug Variations" as a better way to become familiar with him than this book.