Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
12.26.07

Literature is supposed to be about the human condition, or so we are told; we often forget that, as expressed of many canonical works, such claims say less about great writing and more about the entitlement of one human condition over another. Richard Powers’ latest novel The Echo Maker—now in paperback—is certainly concerned with the human condition, but, as illuminated in this timely, multilayered narrative, humanity comes off equal parts inspiring potential and existential pathology.

Karin Schluter has survived a conservative religious upbringing (her late mother used “the Living Scriptures volume like a Magic 8 Ball”) and now works in consumer relations for a computer company in her native Nebraska. Her hard-won stability is shattered when her brother, Mark, suffers a near fatal car accident. Mark survives, but his recovery requires significant physical, cerebral, and emotional rehabilitation. But therapy fails to treat the one effect of the accident that is most troubling for Karin—Mark fails to recognize her and believes that she has been hired to replace the “real” Karin as part of a shadowy and ever-widening conspiracy.

Desperate for answers, Karin takes a long shot and contacts Dr. Gerald Weber, a respected neuroscientist who has written several popular books in the vein of Oliver Sacks: “[Weber’s] accounts revealed the brain’s mind-boggling plasticity and neurology’s endless ignorance. He wrote in a modest voice and ordinary style that placed more faith in individuals’ stories than in prevailing medical wisdom.” Weber’s interest is piqued when he learns that Mark may be suffering from a disorder known as Capgras syndrome, “one of a family of misidentification delusions” which has never before been induced by accidental head trauma. As Weber struggles to help his increasingly paranoid patient, the married doctor makes an unlikely and intense connection with Barbara Gillespie, a nurse’s aide and one of the few people that Mark actually trusts during his long and difficult recovery. The more Weber fails to heal Mark and console Karin, the more he confronts the unsettling possibility that he is a lightweight and a charlatan: “He was just a popularize. An exploitative popularize, at that.” Meanwhile, Karin escapes into the arms of Daniel Riegel, an environmentalist caught in his own struggle to preserve the local crane habitat from unscrupulous development.

As if this weren’t enough of a narrative juggling act, Powers is very clear about the omnipresent but obliquely referenced national events that serve as his novel’s backdrop. Weber, on the way to meet his editor, contemplates the strangely altered Manhattan skyline of May 2002: “The shadows were all wrong: still disorienting, more than eight months on. A patch of sky where there should be none.” Much of the novel occurs in the aftermath of September 11, concluding just as Operation Iraqi Freedom begins. The parallels drawn between the embattled Homeland and Weber’s latest case are as tragically revealing as they are satirically shrewd:

What did Mark suppose was being covered up? Worse: What made him think he could trust Weber? As a rule, Weber never humored patients’ delusions. Yet he humored everyone else, every day of the week. The Pakistani cabbie on the way to LaGuardia, with his theories about Al Qaeda links to the White House. The security agent at the airport, making him remove his belt and shoes. The woman in the plane seat next to him who grabbed his arm at takeoff, sure the cabin would explode at fifteen hundred feet. Humoring Mark was status quo.

Powers is equally nuanced in his treatment of characters, who manage to evoke the fragmented American populace without resorting to Red State/Blue State bromides. At times, the conversations may come off sounding a bit like Platonic dialogues, as the characters try to sort out the novel’s far-ranging thematic concerns—which includes water rights, the nature of the self, and the complications that arise when selves tangle emotionally. More often, Powers imbues his characters with compelling contradictions; far from having escaped her mother’s influence, for instance, it seems that Karin has merely traded one orthodoxy for another in her hopes for Mark’s recovery: “She was clinging to medical science the same way her mother clung to Revelation.” If religion is too often a rationalizing crutch, so is science according to Weber: “The senses were a metaphor at best. Neuroscience had revived Democritus: we speak of bitter and sweet, of hot and cold, but we come no closer to actual qualities than a rough thumbnail.”

Having reached the conclusion of this sprawling, elliptical narrative, one may share the response of Bonnie Travis—a friend and caretaker of Mark’s—after she encounters one of Weber’s books. Bonnie panics at the idea that religious faith is just another trick of the limited human brain. “One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. ‘There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?’ ” Powers refuses to reduce the human condition to contingent physical process or easy redemption. His vision in The Echo Maker is alternately cold and compassionate, an ultimately humane vision reflecting the species that inspires it.