The Echo Maker

The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers

The Echo Maker
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Book Summary Information

Author: Richard Powers
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-08-21
ISBN: 0312426437
Number of pages: 451
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780312426439
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of The Echo Maker

Book Review: Case History
Summary: 2 Stars

There is much interest in this book, but not enough to justify a novel of 451 closely-set pages. Set in Kearney, Nebraska, where migrating cranes come annually to forage around the Platte River, the vast sandhill countryside evokes pages of lyrical writing from the author that show his love for the area without necessarily awakening a similar rapture in the reader. Against this, he sets a story that is simple in its outlines. Mark Schluter, a mechanic in his mid-twenties, drives his truck off a road at night, for no apparent reason. Even when Mark emerges from his coma and regains most of his functions, he still refuses to recognize his sister Karin, who has given up her job to look after him, calling her a cunning look-alike sent to trick him. This apparently is a disorder called Capgras Syndrome, whose rarity brings celebrity neurologist Gerald Weber out to study the patient. As Mark improves in many respects, but degenerates in others, many other people are drawn into the web of remembering, rediscovering, and denying.

There are many stories here. There is the mystery of why Mark crashed, and who left a mysterious get-well note by his bedside, but the accident is really too commonplace for this to sustain the tension of the book. Another mystery surrounds a nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who cares for Mark during his rehabilitation, but who seems to be more than her lowly position would imply; Barbara is a sympathetic character, but I think she would have been a lot more interesting if her origins had not been wrapped in mystery. Weber, a neurologist presumably modeled after Oliver Sacks (author of THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT), is shown at a crisis in his personal life and career, but the author cannot decide between recounting a string of Sacksian case-histories and really exploring Weber as a person; by the time the book reaches its climax, it is hard to feel with him or to care. It is hard also to care about Mark himself, who is neither very interesting nor very likeable; he makes a very weak subject for everybody to get so worked up about.

In contrast, fortunately, there is Karin, by far the most fully-realized character in the book. Her year with Mark involves her going back into her past, examining her failing ambitions, her relationships with two former boyfriends, and her upbringing by fundamentalist parents. There is certainly material for an engaging small-town novel here on the lines of Ann Packer's THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, though not at this length or diluted with so many other materials from so many different genres.

Summary of The Echo Maker

Winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction
 
The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review).
 
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

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