“The Echo Maker”
by Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
451 pages

Imagine a writer who shows the intricacies of the human heart through the relationships among a group of complex, fascinating characters, while embedding their lives in the real world of modern science and technology, politics, business and the natural environment. Imagine such a story in prose that soars to heights of lyricism, while staying grounded in a plot with elements of a mystery story both engaging and disturbing.

If this is what you want in your serious fiction, then Richard Powers is your man.

Powers is the author of nine novels published over the past 21 years. He has a devoted group of readers and critics who regard him as one of the most important and gifted writers working today. His latest novel, “The Echo Maker,” recently earned the 2006 National Book Award.

“The Echo Maker” is principally the story of three people: Mark Schluter, 27, who flips his truck in a near-fatal accident one February night in 2002 on a remote Nebraska road; his only living relative, a sister, Karin, four years older, who leaves her job and returns home to care for him; and a famous New York cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber, who responds to Karin’s plea for help with her brother’s rare Capgras syndrome. The illness leads to a belief that the family and friends in his life after the accident are imposters, doubles or aliens—“The loved one’s face elicits memory, but no feeling,” and because there is no “emotional ratification” there is no true recognition since “logic depends on feeling.”

One of the main threads in the book is the complex relationship between Mark and Karin, who have been incredibly close throughout their lives, growing up as the children of disturbed, unstable parents who were zealots and believers in conspiracies. The exact cause of Mark’s accident is a mystery that runs through the novel, as is a strange, mystical note found on Mark’s hospital bed shortly after the accident.

A powerful recurring image from the natural world also haunts the book: the annual migration of half a million sandhill cranes, three-quarters of the world’s crane population, who return each year near the end of winter to spend a month along the Platte River. They gather to stage, nest and store up nourishment to complete their migration north. The book’s title has its origin in ancient descriptions and mythological beliefs about the crane.

Another important subplot is Karin’s relationship to Daniel, an environmental activist, and the struggle over water rights to save the crane habitat from developers. All of the novel’s characters and subplots are integral to the book’s story; none are inserted to give false weight.

Mark’s Capgras syndrome also serves as a metaphor for aspects of our “normal” lives. Working at the crane refuge, Karin thinks, “The whole world suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off as imposters.”

Powers is a brainy writer with a strong belief that we cannot truly understand our lives without including all of the many contexts in which we live, from the large-scale political and social impact of modern technology, science, the environment and business to the intimate scale of family history and personal relationships. Large and small intersect in many ways that we often do not fully realize.

In an interview from 1999 in “Cultural Logic,” a Marxist e-journal, Powers says, “This is our current malaise: not to believe that we belong to anything larger than ourselves.” To him, the novelist’s job is to say, in as complete a way as possible, what it means to be alive.

With the exception of Mark, there is little humor in the book, and this can make it heavy and slow-moving at times. Powers  has a tendency to be relentlessly serious, with nearly all of the characters full of angst and at some personal crisis point in their lives. The focus is on their uncertainties and vulnerabilities, perhaps to illustrate the fragile and changeable nature of consciousness and sense of self.

A major theme, illustrated by his relationship to Mark and those in Mark’s life, is Gerald Weber’s goal to understand “the basic riddle of conscious existence: How does the brain erect a mind, and how does the mind erect everything else? What is the self, and where are the neurological correlates of consciousness?”

Weber’s popular books tell stories of individual case histories (in the vein of Oliver Sacks) and have made him a celebrity. But when his new book receives strongly critical reviews, he is thrown into a severe personal and professional mid-life crisis, making him doubt the value and validity of his approach to the mind and the morality of his books, as well as his relationship with patients like Mark.

Although not opposed to modern developments in brain research, with its emphasis on physical structures and processes, Weber believes that even when Capgras and other brain disorders are “entirely understandable in modular terms, as a matter of lesions and severed connections between regions in a distributed network, it still manifested in psychodynamic processes—individual response, personal history, repression, sublimation, and wish fulfillment that couldn’t be reduced entirely to low-level phenomena.”

Weber believes that “long after his science delivered a comprehensive theory of self, no one would be a single step closer to knowing what it meant to be another. Neurology would never grasp from without a thing that existed only deep in the impenetrable inside.” He is acutely aware that the job of consciousness is always “to tell a story that is whole, continuous, and stable”—and this is true of both normal and damaged brains.

“The Echo Maker” both instructs and delights. I found it an exhilarating, challenging and engrossing novel and look forward to seeing what complex themes Richard Powers will explore next. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up with his earlier books.