The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

When his little Jess was not a month old, he could get her to stick out her tongue just by sticking out his tongue at her. No counting the miracles involved. She had to locate his tongue relative to his body. Then somehow map his parts onto the feel of hers, find and order a tongue she could not even see, could not even know about. And she did all this at the mere sight of him, this infant who had been taught nothing. Where was the end of his self, the start of hers?

The Echo Maker

I've read one other Richard Powers book, Generosity. That wonderful novel wove a plot around genetics and the possibility of a genetic explanation for behavior, a happiness gene in this case. It was a little like the current wave of historical novels where some researcher stumbles across a startling new insight about this or that artist and in the process of uncovering this new "truth" takes the reader on a magical mystery tour through a period of history. The reader ends up entertained and educated to boot and the author ends up making lots of money by cashing in on this trope.

The Echo Maker is in this vein. Thematically it focuses on the idea of Consciousness and Self. What is it that creates our sense of Self and what how is it that we are conscious of Consciousness? Into this rather large idea we have Mark Schluter, a young man from Nebraska who rolls his truck one evening and ends up with a rare mental condition called Capgas Syndrome, a brain trauma that causes an individual to suffer the delusion that many close friends and relatives have been replaced by imposters, even robots.

For instance, Mark is convinced that his sister, who has abandoned her job and her life in Sioux City to nurse her brother back to normality, is in fact an imposter, part of a plot to drive him crazy. As the book progresses, this delusion branches out to include almost the entirety of Mark's encounters with people and places.

Mark's sister Karin writes Gerald Weber, a famous neurologist, for help. Weber flies to Kearney, meets Mark, and decides to use him as grist for yet another formulaic book about brain disorders. It becomes apparent that Weber is more interested in using Mark than helping him. Weber himself, spurred on by the crappy reviews of his most recent publication, begins to suspect the truth about his motives and begins to wonder about the kind of person he is.

Add to this Mark's two typically rowdy Nebraska buddies who he suspects had something to do with the accident. They aren't talking as one ends up going to war in Iraq (this is set during Bush II) and the other ends up in jail.

Meanwhile, Karin seeks consolation with Daniel, Mark's estranged boyhood friend who has become a crusading environmentalist, and with another man, a land developer, who she once worked for and who is currently trying to land a deal for an eco-resort to be built right on the land where thousands of Sandhill Cranes land each year during their migration.

All of these plot elements go through a satisfying, if predictable, denouement.

Above all of this we have the huge symbol of the cranes flying in and out of the picture. The book juxtaposes all of the ruminations about the nature of Self and Consciousness with the instinctually natural patterns of the cranes.

Mark is in a sense right. We are all of us imposters, alien from our former selves constantly constructing new patterns of consciousness, ending up in a kind of limbo, a nothingness, unable to be the naturally magnificent creatures we are.

Behold the lilies of the valley.

Even Solomon in all his glory had not so fine a cloak as these.

They sow not nor do they reap, yet God watches over them.

Are you not worth more than these?

This is a novel well worth reading.