The Echo Maker: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Mark Schluter, Karin Schluter, Gerald Weber (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalized. MacArthur fellow Powers (Gold Bug Variations, etc.) masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose—powerful, but not overbearing—brings a sorrowful energy to every page. (Oct.)
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From The New Yorker

This novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, addresses the question of how we know who we really are. Mark, who repairs machinery at a meat-processing plant, suffers a head injury that prevents him from recognizing his sister Karin; he believes that she is a look-alike sent to spy on him. Karin, who has spent her life trying to escape their small Nebraska town, returns to old lovers and habits she thought she'd renounced. Stung by Mark's rejection, she sends a desperate plea to an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist whose popular books have suddenly come under critical attack, causing fissures in his public persona and his seemingly perfect marriage. Powers's smooth coincidences and cute patter can be unconvincing and leaden, and he has a tendency to lapse into distracting repetitions. Yet his philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Export Ed edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374146357
• ISBN-13: 978-0374146351
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (119 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #146,564 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

134 of 161 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everything dances.", October 31, 2006

By	K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A relevant book for our time, June 8, 2007

By	K. Daugirdas "st00dious" (Champaign, IL, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book deals with important issues - what exactly is the mind? What is the self? Should we view the brain/mind as a teeming ecosystem of competing impulses and neuro-chemicals? Or, should we take a more holistic perspective?

Even as I try to form some sort of dichotomous framework here, I'm struggling, because Echo Maker is all about showing that the lines are blurry. Before more analysis, a brief synopsis.

Mark Schluter, average redneck, gets into a horrific car accident. He experiences brain damage, and as he rehabilitates he develops "Capgras" Syndrome - the condition of believing your closest friends and family members have been replaced by impostors or robots. His sister, Karin, is the main target. Mark rejects her and accuses her of working for the government in some vast conspiracy against him - he demands his sister back.

The case attracts famous neurologist Gerald Weber. Weber has written several books of case studies on mental patients - his overarching theme is that `we're all a little crazy - each person's brain struggles to produce a consistent story from the information it receives.' Weber's newest book is dismissed as overly simplistic and unscientific - it appears that the world is no longer satisfied with his literary approach to understanding the mind. They crave physiological and chemical explanations, and pills. Even worse, they accuse him of opportunism - visiting mental patients only in the interest of writing highly readable case studies.

The book follows the personal struggles of Karen Schluter and Gerald Weber - both individuals experiencing intense personal doubts. Karen is eternally frustrated that her brother rejects all her love and care. Weber increasingly questions everything he used to believe about the mind - he "stops believing in his research". Both individuals keep returning to Mark. Karen gives up her job to be with him, and Weber, haunted by a sense of abandoning the Schluters, returns several times to see him.

As for the themes...

The obvious one is "medicalizing the human condition." Every deficiency can be smoothed out with a drug. Should it be so? Or is that which is "wrong with us" really that which makes us human?

Powers pokes fun at the common phrase, "are you back to normal?" by asking, "what is normal?" The `normal' characters in the book are constantly experiencing episodes of intense self-confusion, and their crises of identity are highly analogous to pathological conditions that Weber describes in his books.

Capgras is the most pervasive of these disorder-symbols in the book. We are consciously changing, and it takes quite a bit of mental smoothing for the brain to accept the new version of reality (the present) as a continuation of a prior version of reality (the past), rather than something altogether new and strange. Mark literally rejects this leap of logic, but Karen and Weber both struggle with similar issues. Who was I one year ago... five years ago? Am I really the same person who said those things and did those things?

I am No one.

The cryptic beginning of the note that Mark finds at his bedside, and cannot understand. All three major characters felt like nothing at points in the novel. In each case, that moment of desperation and radical humility allows the person to reboot.

149 of 198 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dreadful, January 3, 2007

By	Stephen McLeod (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.