Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15544 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-21
• Released on: 2007-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalized. MacArthur fellow Powers (Gold Bug Variations, etc.) masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose—powerful, but not overbearing—brings a sorrowful energy to every page. (Oct.)
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From The New Yorker
This novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, addresses the question of how we know who we really are. Mark, who repairs machinery at a meat-processing plant, suffers a head injury that prevents him from recognizing his sister Karin; he believes that she is a look-alike sent to spy on him. Karin, who has spent her life trying to escape their small Nebraska town, returns to old lovers and habits she thought she'd renounced. Stung by Mark's rejection, she sends a desperate plea to an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist whose popular books have suddenly come under critical attack, causing fissures in his public persona and his seemingly perfect marriage. Powers's smooth coincidences and cute patter can be unconvincing and leaden, and he has a tendency to lapse into distracting repetitions. Yet his philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Richard Powers's new novel -- a kind of neuro-cosmological adventure -- is an exhilarating narrative feat. The ease with which the author controls his frequently complex material is sometimes as thrilling to watch as the unfolding of the story itself. Yet it opens quietly enough, on the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where the cranes are preparing for their annual migration. Powers clearly has symbolic duties in mind for these birds (the "echo makers" of the title), evolutionary oddities from the center of America; and much of the first part of the book suggests we are in for a traditional novel of theme and character, complete with natural symbolism.

The central character, a 27-year-old meatpacker named Mark Schluter, is in a coma following a mysterious automobile accident. An amiable underachiever, he is devoted to his truck, and it seems inexplicable that he could have flipped it on a straight road when sober. While he is unconscious, an unseen visitor leaves a note by his bed. The note's contents suggest that whoever wrote it was at the scene of the accident -- presumably the person responsible for calling the emergency services and saving Mark's life.

Mark slowly recovers. All his faculties return to him, save one: He does not recognize his elder sister, Karin, who has always been devoted to him. It appears that Mark is the victim of Capgras Syndrome (a real complaint), in which patients refuse to believe that those closest to them are who they claim to be. Mark concedes that the woman who tends to him and takes him home is very like the real Karin and has done her homework on their family history, but he never believes she is really his sister.

Capgras is typically found only in psychiatric patients -- often schizophrenics -- so its development from a head injury raises unusual medical and philosophical questions. In her despair, Karin writes to a famous East Coast neurologist named Gerald Weber, and with his entrance the novel becomes richer. Weber, a sort of Oliver Sacks figure, has made a name by publishing essays about his patients. His curiosity is not unreasonably aroused by this case in a million: "Capgras from an accident," he muses, "a phenomenon that could crown or crash any theory of consciousness." Or, as he puts it to his wife, Sylvie: "It's the kind of neither-both case that could help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind."

As the narrative switches temporarily to Weber's point of view, we see Mark in a different light, but it's still a character-driven novel with the puzzle of human consciousness as its meaty theme. That would be enough for most readers, I imagine, but Powers has other ideas. At about the halfway stage, these themes become secondary to the story. What really happened to Mark that night? Who wrote that note? Will he ever recognize Karin again?

Around these three questions, Powers draws in a larger cast: Karin's nature-conservationist lover and her property-developer ex; Mark's two old buddies from the meatpacking plant and, most importantly, his care assistant, Barbara, who seems over-sophisticated for her job and appears disconcertingly familiar to more than one other character. This complicated story is masterfully controlled; the pace never slackens; the writing remains direct and clear.

While Mark attempts to reintegrate himself, Weber slides unwillingly the other way. An adverse critical and public reaction to his new book, coupled with a sense of failure in Mark's case, precipitates a frightening disintegration. He questions his life's work and, especially, its motivation; he even fails (in a neat parallel to Mark) to recognize the virtues of those closest to him. Weber's breakdown, apparently psychological in cause and effect, is nevertheless analyzed by him in neurological terms, and in a book of bravura switches of viewpoint, this is Powers's greatest coup.

By the end of the novel, the narrative stakes have been raised very high, yet on the three main questions, Powers delivers handsomely: Mysteries are resolved, answers satisfactorily given. For this concentration on plot, however, there remains a price to be paid in thematic richness. It is futile to complain that the riddle of human consciousness is not fully explained; Powers illuminates it as far as current science permits and dramatizes his findings with a novelist's concern for character. Yet the resolution of the Capgras issue, realistic though it is, does not pull its weight emotionally, and the end of the mystery-note story does not reverberate as much as it might.This certainly should not dim one's admiration for Powers's boldness. He is a formidable talent, and this is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel -- which, incidentally, with the inevitable loss of intellectual richness, would make a terrific movie.

Reviewed by Sebastian Faulks
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent and entertaining
This novel, the winner of the 2006 National Book Award, addresses the question of how we know who we really are. This novel is extremely well-crafted and a worthwhile read. Intelligent and entertaining.

Worst book I've read in a long time
I purchased this book because I had read some great reviews. I was immensely disappointed and wish I hadn't wasted the time suffering though the book. The characters are dull and not very likeable. By the end I really didn't care to know what happened to any of them.
One thing in paticular that irked me was that the author attempts to allude to a mystery surrounding the circumstances of the accident. However, by the time the mystery is revealed the reader is no longer interested. Overall, a boring book and a waste of money.

Case History
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.