The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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The Editorial reviews reveal enough of the outline of the story; my intention is to tell readers just how profound is the experience of reading this novel. Now, take a second to consider the passage listed above, and a few more to consider the basic question of "selfness" or subjectivity. When he lights upon something interesting, he'll stay awhile (often too long), pressing into the depths with occasionally gorgeous sentences. Mark has perfected a dingy existence, passing the time with video games, beer and general lunkhead-ery.

Late one winter night, Mark Schluter’s truck overturns on a lonesome stretch of highway outside Kearney, Neb. Who left the note by Mark’s hospital bed the night of the accident, the one that sends him questing through town? Then he has a near fatal car accident in the middle of the night while driving his pickup truck on a deserted road, leaving him in a coma from a severe head injury. Chilly” comes from people who think he can be remote at times, his narrators squinting at his characters through a microscope lens.

Though he spends most of his off time getting drunk and stoned with his buddies, he feels he has got something pretty close to his dream life. The Echo Maker” is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day. Weber's head would be stuffed with human thoughts, not the cold substitutes Powers offers: case study after case study after case study.

Powers zooms in on the brain at the system level -- "unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent and infinitely fragile", it forges a coherent picture of the self, completely unique to each individual ("The man who had taught her than any life one came across was infinitely nuanced and irreproducible"). But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an imposter.And now The Echo Maker examines the working of the human brain and seems to want us to realise that people are far more complex than we might be tempted to make them: science sometimes tries to reduce people to a set of rules, whereas Powers seems to think there is more to us than that. Accumulating fresh insights into the human brain, the doctor sees Mark as a living embodiment of his theories. If not, more's the pity, because alongside its neurological insights, The Echo Maker also argues - beautifully, powerfully - that while we may indeed be slaves to our fragile cerebral processes, compassion is more than just possible, it's vital. Thanks to you I will never like a crane, I will never sympathize with head trauma victims, and I will never finish your dumb book. As Mark’s condition develops, it comes to the attention of Gerald Weber, a famous neurologist and author of several popular books on the subject of the brain.