Minds Matter

Late on a freezing February night, a man in his late twenties rolls his truck on an “arrow-straight country road” outside Kearney, Ne bras ka. His sister, several hours away, gets a call from the hospital and arrives not long after dawn. Considering the severity of the accident, her brother–though badly battered–is exceptionally fortunate, his condition stable. But when she returns to the hospital later in the day, after getting some sleep, her brother’s condition has inexplicably worsened, dramatically so. Next to his bed she finds a cryptic note scrawled in a “spidery” hand:

Karin, the sister, tries unsuccessfully to find out who left the note, but soon a more grotesque enigma preoccupies her. When Mark, her brain-injured brother, comes out of his coma, he claims that she is an imposter, not really his sister, and no matter how much she protests and pleads with him, no matter what tidbits of obscure family lore she dredges up, he is unswerving.

Such is the premise of The Echo Maker, winner of the National Book Award. With an epigraph from A.R. Luria, the legendary Soviet neuroscientist, and a leading character clearly inspired by Oliver Sacks, Powers’s book is, in part, the most impressive attempt to date to take the mind-boggling findings of contemporary brain science and flesh them out. Mark’s delusion about his sister turns out to be an instance of Capgras syndrome, an affliction rare enough to lure neuroscientist and bestselling writer Gerald Weber–whose latest book is just appearing–from New York to the Great Plains. And what Powers suggests is that such freakish disorders are not so far removed as we suppose from the ordinary business of consciousness. Mark Schluter, desperately improvising conspiracy theories, is making up a self on the fly, as we all do.

How this cashes out for Richard Powers I’m not entirely sure. If he is intending to argue that the continuity of the self is finally an illusion, the way that various savants these days are telling us that free will is an illusion conjured by evolution for its own purposes, consciousness itself an expedient illusion to mask the unruly modular machinery that does the real work–if this is the point, let us dissent. But if he intends, simultaneously, to affirm the mysterious continuity of the self while pressing us to see how that self is never static, never achieved once and for all, then he’s prodding us helpfully, as Hugh Kenner did when he said that there is no such thing as “plain English,” that reading an ordinary sentence is more or less as demanding as reading a line from Finnegans Wake. (We’re simply unaware of most of the routine decoding.)

The Echo Maker brilliantly shows various minds in the act of making sense or suddenly losing the seemingly effortless art of perception and understanding–so persuasively, in fact, that the book should perhaps come with a warning sticker, explaining that you may look up from reading and fail to recognize, for a moment, the dearly familiar face across from you, or find yourself in what seems to be an utterly strange place. “If these symptoms persist, call your neurologist.”

For most writers this would be enough–more than enough–to fuel a novel, especially given the moral complexity of Gerald Weber, who comes to feel that he has exploited the subjects of his books, and the tangled histories of Karin and Mark and those close to them. But Powers has more on his mind. Mark’s accident occurs during the annual migratory visit of the sandhill cranes, who descend en masse on the Platte River and tarry there for a few weeks en route to northern climes. The river is threatened by development, meaning that the cranes are in jeopardy, too.

I hear you groaning, Dear Reader. You are already weary of the latest vogue in fictional villainy, which brings us a seemingly endless succession of interchangeable despoilers, guilty of crimes against Nature. Don’t be so hasty to conclude that Powers would merely irritate you. There’s nothing facile in his sense of the human plight, and the cranes point beyond themselves.

“One of the Anishinaabe clans was named the Cranes–Ajijak or Businasee–the Echo Makers,” Powers writes:

So there has been a Fall. (Any arguments with that?) Is there redemption? Certainly not. Powers seems at pains to emphasize that what we have in mind is the crabbed fundamentalist faith of Karin and Mark’s mother. But the enigmatic note that Karin finds at her brother’s bedside hints that there is yet reason for hope. Where did it come from? That’s a puzzle entwined with another, sufficient to keep the reader turning the pages to the very end, when all is revealed. At which point you may very well want to go back to page one and start rereading.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.