A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebraska, in Richard Powers' ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered journey to self-awareness. 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 hospitalised.
Sounds like the basis for a thrilling and challenging novel doesn’t it? The reviewers and critics certainly thought so, even shortlisting Power’s book for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Me? I was engaged at first, but quickly started to become frustrated with the inarticulate, self-absorbed and fundamentally unsympathetic characters as we become gradually caught up their banal personal and existential crises. By the end I was equally frustrated with the author Powers himself, as the narrative descends into what is essentially a mid-life crisis by Weber interspersed with pseudo-psychological musings that go nowhere: “do I exist? What does it mean to exist?” that sort of thing, I may have found this engaging as a 14-year old, but these words are in the mouths of middle-aged adults, including so-called expert neurologists…
Much of The Echo Maker is driven by Karin's anxious but ineffectual investigation of Mark's extreme neural diagnosis but there are passages which meander as much as the nearby Platte River, whose instinct-driven migrant cranes give Powers an easy symbolic backdrop to the obscure workings of memory in the human brain. This concept-heavy narrative follows Gerald Weber, a celebrity neuroscientist fascinated by the spread of Mark's paranoia. His imploding career and marriage becomes a sub-plot that helps to saturate the fabric of The Echo Maker with reflections in neuroscience which spill beyond what might be needed to address Mark's plight. Karin's involvement with two old flames - one a developer and one an environmentalist, both locked in a bitter contest over the future of the migration grounds - further distracts from Mark's essentially linear progress.
Rather than enriching the novel, these sub-plots are a too convenient, too disengaging and generally dissipate tension from what could be a shorter, sharper book.
By the end of the book, when the denouement finally comes (which is largely signposted a mile away) - like the Nebraskan winter, it left me cold.
Sounds like the basis for a thrilling and challenging novel doesn’t it? The reviewers and critics certainly thought so, even shortlisting Power’s book for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Me? I was engaged at first, but quickly started to become frustrated with the inarticulate, self-absorbed and fundamentally unsympathetic characters as we become gradually caught up their banal personal and existential crises. By the end I was equally frustrated with the author Powers himself, as the narrative descends into what is essentially a mid-life crisis by Weber interspersed with pseudo-psychological musings that go nowhere: “do I exist? What does it mean to exist?” that sort of thing, I may have found this engaging as a 14-year old, but these words are in the mouths of middle-aged adults, including so-called expert neurologists…
Much of The Echo Maker is driven by Karin's anxious but ineffectual investigation of Mark's extreme neural diagnosis but there are passages which meander as much as the nearby Platte River, whose instinct-driven migrant cranes give Powers an easy symbolic backdrop to the obscure workings of memory in the human brain. This concept-heavy narrative follows Gerald Weber, a celebrity neuroscientist fascinated by the spread of Mark's paranoia. His imploding career and marriage becomes a sub-plot that helps to saturate the fabric of The Echo Maker with reflections in neuroscience which spill beyond what might be needed to address Mark's plight. Karin's involvement with two old flames - one a developer and one an environmentalist, both locked in a bitter contest over the future of the migration grounds - further distracts from Mark's essentially linear progress.
Rather than enriching the novel, these sub-plots are a too convenient, too disengaging and generally dissipate tension from what could be a shorter, sharper book.
By the end of the book, when the denouement finally comes (which is largely signposted a mile away) - like the Nebraskan winter, it left me cold.
Next up is Idaho in the Rocky Mountains; representing the northwest region of the USA. I take to the air with 'Five Skies' - author Ron Carlson's first novel in 30 years - hoping for a more down to earth novel...
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