The Echo Maker
 Front cover and spine of first edition | |
| Author | Richard Powers |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 464 pp |
| ISBN | 0-374-14635-7 |
| OCLC | 62790370 |
| 813/.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3566.O92 E27 2006 |
| Preceded by | The Time of Our Singing |
The Echo Makeris a 2006 novel by American writerRichard Powers.It won theNational Book Award for Fiction[1][2] and was aPulitzer Prize for Fictionfinalist.[3]
Plot introduction
[edit]On a winter night on a remoteNebraskaroad, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman — who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister — is really an impostor. Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitiveneurologistGerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing brain disorders. Weber recognized Mark's condition as a rare case ofCapgras syndrome— the delusion that people in one's life are doubles or impostors — and eagerly investigates.
What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident.
Characters
[edit]Main characters
[edit]- Karin Schluter quits her job as a service representative to return home toKearney, Nebraskato care for her comatose brother.
- Mark Schluter has a mysterious truck rollover on a deserted country road and eventually comes out of a coma suffering from a variety of delusions.
- Gerald Weber is a popular writer of books on neurology who answers a personal email from Karin requesting that he come to Nebraska. Weber may be a partial fictionalization ofOliver Sacks,1933–2015, who was a neurologist, best-selling author, and professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine. Sacks was the author of a number of nonfiction books, beginning withAwakenings(1973) andThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat(1985), which use case histories interwoven with explanatory narrative to describe a range of brain conditions that result in unusual manifestations of neurologic deficits, in much the way Weber does inThe Echo Maker.
Analysis
[edit]According to Richard Powers,[4]
[The] aim inThe Echo Makeris to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration. To this end, my technique was what some scholars of narrative have calleddouble voicing.Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority.
In a review in theNew York Review of Books,Margaret Atwooddescribed the novel's "underlying sketch" as being fromThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz.[5]
Colson Whitehead,writing inThe New York Times,called it a "post-911 novel.. not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day."[6]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^
"National Book Awards – 2006".National Book Foundation.Retrieved 2012-03-27.
(With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ Andrea Lynn (November 2006)."A Powers-ful Presence".LASNews Magazine.University of Illinois.Retrieved2006-11-29.
- ^"Fiction".Past winners & finalists by category.The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-27.
- ^Richard Powers,"Echo Maker Roundtable #5",20 October 2006
- ^Margaret Atwood."In the Heart of the Heartland",fromThe New York Review of Books,December 21, 2006, pg.58-60
- ^Colson Whitehead,"Migratory Spirits",The New York Times,22 October 2006
External links
[edit]- [1]"Fresh Air," December 12, 2006, radio interview with Richard Powers
- Bibliography of editions of 'The Echo Maker.'
- The Echo Makerreviews.Collected list of reviews.
- The Echo MakerReviewsatMetacritic
- Richard Powers talks with Alec MichodinThe Believer