I finished Richard Powers's The Echo Maker yesterday and it turned out to be a fantastic book. Even with all the accolades (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize Nomination) I was still afraid that the novel would be dry, dull, and dreary. And at first it is, but intentionally, as Karin Schluter comes to Nebraska in the wake of her brother's catastrophic car accident, we meet a woman who is not really well equipped for the challenges of life and who easily falls victim to her own moods, emotions, and false hopes. When brother Mark regains consciousness he no longer recognizes his sister but insists that she is an impostor, a cleverly crafted simulation designed to trick him. From here the book surprisingly turns from mere medical drama to an engaging psychological thriller. A page turner, but like nothing I've read before.
The characters in The Echo Maker don't act like characters in books and movies, but more like people you know. They behave inappropriately, say the wrong thing, react emotionally when logic is needed, abuse cool rationality when a kind heart is what is required. They engage, but fail to engage, and conversations that would take two lines in an episode of House take months of introspection to get out. The plot itself, and the central mystery of what happened to Mark the night of the crash is revealed but not in the linear mechanistic way we've grown to expect from the movies. There are clues to be chased down, pieces to be put together, but in the real world there is no one to play detective and put it all together for us. There are bills to be paid, and therapy to go to, and the maddening presence and demands of other people to deal with.
Instead we have a book that evokes genre conventions and then knocks them down. It is a thriller without a hero or a villain, a conspiracy without a They, a ghost story haunted by the living, and horror novel where the only monsters are those in our minds.
The rational savior of the book is Gerald Weber, a neurologist and popular author, who has become famous writing on the bizarre neurological cases he's worked on (a la Oliver Sacks): people who suffer accidents and can no longer form new memories, who can only see things on the left side of their bodies, who believe their close relatives have been replaced by robots, who can no longer distinguish individual faces, etc. But when Dr. Weber comes to Nebraska to save Mark, he suffers a crisis of conscience. His cool rationality is a facade, and he begins to doubt everything he believes about identity and consciousness. He has become more of a storyteller and myth-maker than scientist, and ultimately he fears that his life's work is unethical. It exploits the powerless, gives false hope to broken minds, and can neither provide a cure nor expand our understanding of what's gone wrong.
Throughout the book, neurology is explored in great detail, highlighting the fragility and unknowableness of human consciousness. What we consider to be our coherent selves, is nothing but an illusion created by the complexity of the brain. One break in the system, and the self that we thought we were blinks out of existence, or becomes someone knew and unrecognizable. There is no identity, no memories inside our heads, except the story that we tell ourselves over and over again to make our lives seem coherent and meaningful. Frames in a film that give the illusion of movement.
The cranes that gather each winter on the Platte river in Nebraska become a metaphor for human memory and its fragility. These are creatures that have gathered in the same spot year after year since the time of the dinosaurs and their annual movements provide a symbolic map in the mind of nature. As time passes and humans exploit the resources of the Platte, the ecosystem is threatened, and the birds grower ever closer to extinction. What will become of the Great Plains when this memory is lost, how will the mind of nature be damaged or impaired?
In Margaret Atwood's review, she finds The Wizard of Oz encoded into the story (and why not? OZ is in many ways America's ur-myth): Mark as the Scarecrow, Dr. Weber as the Wizard, Karin as Dorothy. It's a clever reading but not one I caught onto. Perhaps next time I'll listen to Dark Side of the Moon while I read and see what happens (synchronicity, coincidence, anarchist miracles). After all it too speaks of the mysteries of the human mind.
