The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers

In The Echo Maker Richard Powers interweaves the migratory habits of cranes, neuroscience, and science writing in the story of a man’s struggle to regain his identity set against the struggle of others around him to avoid losing theirs. It is also a mystery story in which a man who has literally lost his mind must struggle to recover it along with the facts surrounding the incident that caused him to lose his mind to begin with. Powers is an intelligent and passionate writer. I don’t know of a more intelligent writer, and intelligence is the driving force in his two best novels, Galatea 2.2 and The Goldbug Variations, the latter of which mixes genetics, Bach, Glenn Gould, Poe, and parallel love stories separated by three decades.

Powers is a novelist who tells and explains rather than dramatizes. He is D. H. Lawrence rather than Henry James, although he explores the social and cultural matrices of science in the same detailed way that James explored the social networks of the American upper crust. He typically narrates in a third-person fashion through his main characters, sometimes relying on internal monologues. Some of his earlier novels used first person. For me, the way in which Powers narrated The Echo Maker was at times problematic and a source of obscurity.

I believe but cannot be certain that the title of The Echo Maker alludes to one of the ways in which human beings learn to speak—by imitating the sounds they hear around them-- and perhaps also some of the social and mating habits of cranes.

Mark is a 26 year old man who is in a terrible accident that leaves him severely brain damaged. His sister Karin comes to be with him during his recovery. Powers has carefully studied neuroscience and uses his knowledge of the subject to illuminate Mark’s recovery. When he does regain his ability to speak and ultimately his physical abilities, he discovers, or believes that he discovers, that Karin is not really his sister but someone who is pretending to be his sister. This is the result of his brain injury. It is called Capgras Syndrome, where the patient is unable to recognize those closest to him, members of the family. He also does not recognize his dog or house—he believes that replicas of his sister, dog, and house were created to deceive him by a sinister government conspiracy. Karin writer Dr. Weber, a renowned psychologist whose books about the human brain and about brain injured individuals have brought him considerable popularity and success, for help. Because of the rare nature of Mark’s injury and the resulting Capgras syndrome, Weber comes to visit Mark. Karin finds her own mental stability wavering when her brother fails to recognize her. Dr. Weber suffers a similar instability when negative reviews of his most recent book convince him that everything he has written is without worth.

One of the real subjects is the relationship of the mind and the brain, the nature of human consciousness, of identity, how the people and the world around us define who we are, how we define them.

Powers is very effective at characterization. Karin is fully developed in The Echo Maker. Other characters are also well drawn but not always well convincing. Mark and his friends Dwayne and Rupp work at a meat processing plant. Mark repairs machinery used n the slaughtering process, while Dwayne and Rupp do the actual slaughtering. These are supposed to be hard-living guys, and I’m not sure that Powers quite pulls off their characters. But he still takes them seriously. Powers’ characters are three-dimensional. They live and think and are not stereotypes. They’re also biological creatures. Powers pays much attention to the physiology, the biology of his characters. He keeps us aware both of Mark as a character struggling to recover his identity as well as a biological organism recovering from a serious injury. In The Gold Bug Variations he parallels the love story of two geneticists with accounts of evolutionary theory in which human love, the reproductive urge, is explained as a process necessary to the transmission of genetic codes from one generation to the next. Strangely, this does not subvert the romance of the love story. If anything, it makes the romance more poignant since the woman has had herself sterilized and can’t transmit the genetic codes.

In The Echo Maker human consciousness is reduced to a series of neural transmissions. Powers does not consistently succeed in explaining the complex ideas he is exploring in the novel. There is a level of abstraction than never quite resolves itself. I often found myself, especially in the latter half of the novel, struggling to understand what was going on, as Powers explained the feelings and mental states and motivations and thoughts of his characters, rarely allowing them to speak outright, except to each other.

I enjoyed, admired, and was moved by this novel. For Powers, the science of the human mind, of genetics, of human life, is as mysterious and wonderful as any religions moment of transfiguration could be. Yet there are moments in the novel where Powers fails in some basic way to be clear about the science that underlies his book. I reread the last fifty pages of the book to be clear on what was happening. I was especially interested in how the cranes were involved in the conclusion of the novel. On rereading, the details were much clearer, but the conclusion of the book seems worked out in a way that is more evident in the emotional progress of the characters than in an intellectual one.

The cranes migrate in huge flocks and in most ways are unlike humans. They are creatures of instinct. They lack in any conventional meaning a personal identity or consciousness. They are organisms rather than individuals. Individuality for cranes means nothing. Yet like human beings they are the product of evolution and are this novel’s confirmation of the miracle of life, which for Richard Powers is not a matter of the spirit but of the chemical and biological processes that produce life. They also play a significant role in the struggle of various characters surrounding Mark to recover their mental stability. Mark himself in one of his more paranoiac delusions wonders whether scientists transplanted a portion of the brain of a crane into his head to replace an injured portion of his own brain. Powers uses this delusion as one basis for demonstrating the evolutionary relationship of cranes and human beings.

One unifying thread in the novel concerns the details of Mark’s accident, which he cannot remember except for a vague image of something vertical and white standing in the road at the scene of his accident. Mark’s desire to know the circumstances of the accident grows more intense as his recovery progresses. Soon after the accident, someone visits him in the hospital, and he discovers a cryptically worded note sitting on his bedside table. Mark wonders whether he has a guardian angel, whether his friends Dwayne and Rupp were involved in the accident, whether the accident was the result of his suicide attempt. The facts are revealed at the end of the novel in a way that seems contrived and artificial, more Spielbergian than literary. I’m not certain this novel really ends in a conventional way, but it is a satisfying and impressive achievement.

The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.