The Echo Maker
I really enjoyed this book, probably as much as any contemporary fiction (not that I read much ;>) of recent years. The only other contender would be The Known World, but save that for another day. So, some notes.
Love the names: Rupp and Cain seem right out of Waiting for Godot, Daniel Riegel is suitably quasi-regal quasi-biblical, Bonnie is just spot-on prairie, Gerald Weber is spot on as well (and at least the same character counts as “Oliver Sacks” hee hee, the Gerald possibly a nod to Gerald Edelman), the slightly off Karin, Karsh the Shark, not sure what to do with Schluter, ….
Love the organization, 5 chapters built around the central puzzle/theme trope of the book, reproduced here b/c I kept flipping around looking for it:
-
I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else
It unfolds nicely as the story unfolds, with the great epigraphs from Loren Eiseley and Aldo Leopold to mark the sections.
The plot is quite crisp, deftly mixing family drama, the mystery of the event, and a rich cast of characters with conflicting motivations and impulses, etc. And though, there is a consistently Powers-ian voice throughout, the per-character instantiations of that voice range widely and effectively.
Best, I love that this is a fiction writer who can unabashedly engage with “science” with a rich, sympathetic, critical set of frameworks. The implicit critique of Sacksian psychiatry is long overdue (one of my college professors, Arthur Quinn, wrote a similarly critical essay on Sacks 20 years ago, but it slipped beneath the waves as far as I know) — what Powers has done here is worth thorough consideration. The engagement with neuroscience and consciousness is compelling (a theme for Powers? the only other book of his I’ve read is the AI’d Galatea 2.2, and the interleaving with ecology is really provocative (Edelman again?).
Oh and can I just say: a few weeks earlier I attempted to read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and had to put it down as just too hackneyed, cloying, predictable, etc. Just bathing in 9/11. Powers’s book on the other hand is truly and elegantly a post-9/11 book — informed by it, framed by it, could not have been written before it, and yes avoids any easy entrapment by it. Hurrah!
Perhaps more detailed thoughts will follow … ;>