The Echo Maker (2006)
Richard Powers (1957)
451 pages
“God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of”
Bruce Springsteen, Brilliant Disguise
In the opening pages of Richard Powers’ novel The Echo Maker, a truck traveling down an isolated road in Nebraska suddenly “arcs through the air, corkscrewing into [a] field.” (4) Once on the scene, firemen need torches to cut it open and free the driver, Mark Shulter, who ends up in the hospital with traumatic injuries. Mark’s sister, Karin, arrives at his bedside hours later, and over the subsequent weeks dedicates herself to his care as he undergoes surgeries, a coma, and finally a long, slow recovery.
When Mark does eventually regain his ability to walk and speak, however, Karin discovers to her profound shock that he views her as an imposter, convinced that she has replaced his ‘real’ sister. Mark’s doctor diagnoses him as having Capgras Syndrome, describing it to Karin as that the
sufferer … misidentifies his loved ones. A mother or a father. A spouse. The part of his brain that recognizes faces is intact. So is his memory. But the part that processes emotional association has somehow disconnected from them. (61)
Attempting to reestablish their relationship, Karin reminds Mark of experiences from their childhood. Although surprised that this ‘imposter’ could know such details, Mark’s mind manages to create ever more complex explanations for how she could have learned about them, in order to justify his certainty that she’s not his actual sister.
But Karin soon discovers that Weber is fighting his own demons – mild apprehension over the worthiness of his fame exploding into full-fledged insecurity as his latest book meets with a growing crescendo of criticism over his anecdotal methods, accusing him of exploiting the people in the case histories he describes. Wracked by increasingly debilitating self-doubt, Weber oscillates between engaging closely with Mark as a patient, in order to assuage his concern over the exploitation charge, and trying to maintain the dispassionate distance of a researcher. Ultimately, it becomes clear to Karin that Weber has come largely out of analytical interest, and that clinically he has little more to offer regarding Mark than reaffirming “neurology’s endless ignorance.”
Through Mark, and the characters impacted by the disorienting changes to his view of the world, Powers explores the cryptic realm of consciousness – deeply mysterious even in what could hazardously be defined as a “normal” person, but on dramatic display when things go wrong in the mind.
Mark certainly represents an extreme example, his injury causing him to find not only his sister to be a double, but even his dog, his house and his neighborhood. While they all look familiar to him, they all at the same time feel just a bit off, changed in some immeasurable way that his mind works overtime to justify by seeing it all as a secret conspiracy that he’s become caught up in.
The other characters, however, have no traumatic physical injury to fall back as explanation.
Weber, for his part, finds in Mark a particularly dramatic example of consciousness gone awry – a perfect case study for a future paper or book. But, with the fame and stature that had come to undergird his view of himself having now been turned upside down by the criticism of his new book, his travels to Nebraska to interview Mark only further unmoor him from the life he had made for himself.
And Karin, brought back to her hometown by Mark’s injury, finds herself reengaging with people and events she had tried to leave behind by moving away. Combined with the shock of hearing Mark’s third person description of her, one fundamentally at odds with her own image of herself, Karin comes to feel increasingly adrift, unsure what to do next, for her brother or with her life.
Ultimately, then, it is not just Mark who comes to doubt what he’d thought he was sure of. And the question becomes not just whether Mark will regain an emotional connection to those closest to him, but also whether Karin and Webber will be able to regain their psychological equilibrium, as the stability of their conception of themselves and their lives becomes increasingly precarious.
Unfortunately, I found all of this largely unmoving. The various syndromes and afflictions that Powers works into the story, and what they reveal about the broader mystery of consciousness, are titillating and perhaps necessary to demonstrate the range of experience of Dr. Weber and the variety of afflictions that can occur, but at a point it becomes evident that no one knows much of anything concrete about consciousness.
And I found it hard to generate much sympathy for the main characters. They have a variety of manias and neuroses – don’t we all – but they have seemingly little or no self-awareness, and even less ability or will to push back when they do become even dimly aware of what they are experiencing. Mark, at least, has the excuse of the impact of his near-fatal accident. But the others come to seem like a bunch of out-of-control bumper cars, bouncing off one another and the walls of their inner worlds with little indication that they have any ability to deal with what fate has handed them.
Perhaps, though, that is Powers’ point. For those who have confronted the mystery of consciousness and the self, the story is mostly a rather straightforward drama wrapped up in mysteries of which you are already aware; it does little to deepen understanding. If, however, a reader arrives at the story not having thought much about consciousness, not having spent much time contemplating or questioning their own understanding and image of themselves, then perhaps this story opens their eyes to the fundamental mysteries of consciousness, and the disquieting fluidity of our conception of ourselves.
Other notes and information:
A wave moved through her, a thought on a scale she’d never felt. No one had a clue what our brains were after, or how they meant to get it. … For an instant, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras. (347)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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