(This is the third in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Two, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Dan Wickett writes:

Like Levi, and it seems Sarah, I’m indebted to Ed and his roundtable idea as I’d not read any Powers before, and now have a small mountain of books I look forward to getting into soon.

I think Powers has done a magnificent job, with The Echo Maker, in giving his readers a great deal to think about. The storyline of Mark Schluter and Capgras Syndrome, a condition I’m going to assume most are unaware of, would have been thought provoking enough, but the inclusion of cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber, a man who has observed and taken case studies over the past two decades allows Powers to drop many different neurological syndromes onto the reader throughout.

Reading the various anecdotes Weber either tossed out to others in the novel, or thought to himself, left me wondering just how rare it is for a person to see him or herself, others, or the world, in what might be considered a normal way? Is it possible that a child who never seems to be able to stop him or herself from doing something we believe that they know they will get in trouble for, is actually just acting as their neurological system allows them to, and not out of some obstinance?

Not having read other work by Powers (yet!), but having read an interview or two that he’s given, it’s pretty apparent, as others before me have mentioned, that he’s a writer of ideas, and I’ve seen his name linked with writers such as Delillo and Pynchon in this regard. I think one of the more difficult aspects for such a novelist is balancing along that very thin wire that holds him or her from falling too far into ideas and not writing about characters that the reader will care about — just creating enough to allow them to get into the ideas they want to dig into — something akin to an old Hollywood set with wooden fronts for buildings because the scene was going to be out on the street and not inside.

Powers, at least in The Echo Maker, has kept his balance. There are a good five or six characters within that I was interested in enough to worry about how the ideas were affecting them, and not just about the ideas themselves. Like Jenny, I love the fact that Powers concentrated so much on a sibling relationship, allowing Mark and Karin to delve into their individual and combined relationships with their parents as well. While marriage, and one’s nuclear family is certainly an important aspect to who we are, the fact is, most of us live with our parents and a sibling or two for the developmental stages of our lives, and especially through the stages where we develop the most in terms of neurological issues.

Megan Sullivan wrote:

Wow, people have thrown out lots of interesting ideas and questions. One of the things I love best about Powers is that his books always draw deep discussion. No matter the topic, I usually end up thinking long and hard about what I’ve just read. With The Echo Maker I would say that he’s succeeded in creating a novel of ideas complete with complex believable characters, which most critics don’t seem to think possible.

Like Dan, I found the relationship between Mark and Karin one of the more fascinating aspects of this book. Familial roles are hard to change. They seem fixed and can often seem like a burden. I know that when I go visit my family, we fall into old familiar patterns. Once Karin’s role as the steady caretaker is taken away by Mark’s Capgras, she loses her identity. WIthout those familiar “landmarks” how is she supposed to find her way? How does the crane find its way?

Also, I wonder if Powers is suggesting that the cranes and possibly Nature are the only real possessors of true memories. This passage struck me: “He blunders toward that fact, the only one large enough to bring him home, falling backward toward the incommunicable, the unrecognized, the past he has irreparably damaged, just by being, Destroyed and remade with every thought. A thought he needs to tell someone before it, too, goes.” (451) Nothing we remember can be completely accurate. Yet the birds are able to navigate their way back and forth each year, even with landscape changed by the vagaries of mankind. It’s imprinted, its memory is a map.

Ok, I’ll stop there. I’ve got a lot more to think about and I’m looking foward to more emails.

Edward Champion wrote:

Well, folks, you’ve set down some very interesting observations. Before I offer some additional thoughts (and I have about eight pages of notes here, so pardon the length), I wanted to jump back to Judith’s evocation of Wallace Stevens and suggest that there’s something considerably more intricate going on in this book about the role of absolute values in American culture. I believe that The Echo Maker is very much the social novel that Powers intended with Gain, revisited and repolished. As Jessica observed, while the book concerns itself with many nuanced social arcs, this novel is less partisan, permitting one to see “both sides of the argument.”

I don’t believe the broad ethical dilemma that Powers offers is solely a matter of what it means to “be” and “seem,” but how one negotiates through absolute environmental variables (e.g., “WELCOME CRANE PEEPERS”) that are ever shifting — a conundrum which extends not just to the cranes’ dissipating existence, but to the town of Kearney, Nebraska and nearly every character in this book. Karsh’s developmental fervor has already been remarked upon. But consider how Weber cannot pinpoint the name of his daughter’s lover, or Barbara’s overqualified status as a nurse (in particular, her great familiarity with books). Consider too the migratory nature of Karin’s life reflecting the cranes, viewed by her rebooted brother as an impostor (perhaps due to not being in a fixed environmental locale?) and fairly ordinary, even though Powers tells us, “She herself had altered, perhaps more than any of them.” (263) I also found Powers’ description of clothing quite interesting. Sartorially speaking, he was most specific with Barbara and Karin, the two characters who are perhaps hiding the most and who have, we are led to believe, failed the most.

This not only reinforces Judith’s dichotomy, but sets up a mighty textual terrain containing interesting fusions: “heavy bluegrass metal,” the consistent comparisons to life as a video game, the Wikipedia-like People’s Free Encyclopedia merging fact with conjecture, and cell phones often compared with mere props from thrillers and science fiction films. For me, one of the most interesting fusions was Mark as both hunter and naturalist, suggesting a working-class reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt. There are references to gods, particularly near the end of the book, just as the characters hope to make one big existential kill before the end of the book’s year-long cycle (of which more quite soon). I think the recurrent imagery of cars is also very important: not just because it is the quintessential American symbol of power, but because the automobile (specifically, the truck) is a great symbol of momentum, of divagating through an uncertain environment, unsafe at any speed. And yet it is the truck that has caused Mark himself to spill over. He has moved too fast and hard, and it is this failed momentum that causes his life and the lives around him to shatter. (On a side note, I found it interesting that his girlfriend Bonnie is religious and yet is taken with painting toes, thus “marking” Mark. And what is painting toes but bending over in a circular and thus cyclical position? As I’ll go into more in a minute, I think The Echo Maker can be read as the representation of a cycle.)

No matter how happy or successful the characters are, they often face the pitfall of being unable to adjust to the world around them, often bogged down with self-destructive, solipsistic impulses (Karin smoking and Weber letting his book’s critical reception tear him down, to name just two). Now for each of these two examples, I think it’s fair to judge these as “self-destructive and solipsistic,” since Powers himself judges as omniscient narrator and thus invites us to, portraying both Karin and Weber’s feelings as these incidents happen. It is clear that what these characters feel is as important as what they perceive.

As Sarah suggested, this is very much about “meditations on levels of discontinuity.” But I think it’s important to identify where this discontinuity comes from. So I put forth the question to the group: is it the environment that causes these characters to disconnect or is it the characters’ latent makeup? Are they like the cranes, migrating by instinct, congregating in a diner to meet their spouses by complete coincidence?

In some sense, Capgras Syndrome is something of a liberator for Mark. Because while the other characters must face the challenge of continually adapting to ever-shifting absolutes, Mark has the advantage of a fresh perspective. He is, as I suggested above, reborn. Rebooted. Does this make him susceptible to false ideologies, whether science or religion?

No one has made mention of the mysterious note: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.” There is something within this note that suggested to me the capitalized nouns of the Declaration of Independence, that the note, like our founding document, is a statement of ideology, a blueprint for surviving in a world changing too fast. But this note is about random compassion, of paying it forward, so that the powers of good might live to restore brothers or cranes or any other target of basic human decency. The real question is whether kindness will be enough to preserve the world.

To return to the troubling William Deresiewicz review, I was initially inclined to agree with Deresiewicz’s criticism that some of the characters’ voices “sound like Powers’ mouthpiece” — in particular, the Three Muskrateers, who, despite Powers’ efforts to flesh out Rupp’s backstory with Karin, felt particularly singular. But it occurred to me, upon further rumination, that Powers may have intended this trio to serve as a 21st century Greek chorus. It is their singularity of voice which imputes absolute cultural values that crush the Muskrateers’ spirits, turning them into perfect synchronous tools, and, as Levi notes, in at least one case causing them to be unconsciously exploited by external forces promising them a reliable answer. But on the other side of the coin, Daniel himself is also quite singular, retreating to a “monk’s home” — in his own way, relying upon others to help him safe the Refuge. It cannot be an accident that Karin is attracted to both
of these men.

This brings up another aspect of Echo that I found interesting: the concentration on fixed labor vs. work that one enjoys doing. Both Karin and Weber find a certain redemption when they choose work that comes closer to their hearts. And yet Mark, by contrast, wants to get out of cognitive therapy and get back to his job. There is the moment when one of the Muskrateers confronts Karin about how much he makes a month, and this suggested to me that money is, likewise, an absolute value that clutters the more individualistic and heartfelt powers of goodness.

I was also curious if any of you viewed the four main parts (with the fifth part serving as an epilogue of sorts) as four seasons. I think it’s pretty significant that Mark’s accident happens during the winter, the peak time when the cranes are migrating (as opposed to flying, like Kalatozov’s great 1957 film, to which I kept mining the text for a reference, curious if Powers was familiar with it, because there’s a good deal of cinematic references in this book). I also believe that the first part’s imagery of wheat and plant life pushing through snow is as suggestive as the cows that occupy the third and fourth parts, grazing upon the grass and waiting for their eventual demise upon a barbeque. What’s interesting is that the seasons here don’t quite match up with the way the narrative is split up into four parts and yet I sensed an agricultural cycle at work here, something perhaps undetectable, if not wholly disregarded, by humanity.

I would also like to remark on Jenny’s observation about the relationships in this book. I found it interesting that Weber referred to his wife as “Woman” and, while I appreciated the sincerity of this marriage, seeing Powers’ attempt to qualify a type of relationship he hasn’t really written about, I felt that something about the telephone calls was askew. Then again, like the Three Muskrateers, this may have been part of the point: another meditation on discontinuity that further flummoxed Weber.

In case it isn’t clear enough, I could probably go on about this novel for some time. So I’ll shut up for now, maybe weighing in later, and let others riff from here.

(This is the second in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Levi Asher writes:

I’m really glad this roundtable inspired me to read this book. I find The Echo Maker to be a very big book — big themes, big scope, a big impression on anyone who reads it. Like the Platte River, its greatest dimension is not its depth but its width — like the brain in the neurologist’s fictional first book, The Echo Maker is “wider than the sky.”

Why is this so? Well, as Sarah’s observations indicate, the book seems designed to give each reader a taste of Capgras Syndrome. Broken connections are everywhere. To fall in love, as both Karin Schluter and Gerard Weber find out, is to will yourself into forgetfulness. One of the funniest moments in the book is when Capgras-stricken Mark Schluter complains that he doesn’t recognize his favorite radio station anymore, because it doesn’t play the same kind of music it used to. Who among us hasn’t suffered from this particular societal disassociation?

Many reviewers have listed the numerous metaphors for memory
dislocation in this book: the flimsy Homestar trailer where Mark lives, the magnificent birds that only one sorry hippie named Daniel bothers to commune with. I love it like crazy that Powers dares to hit on current events and hand us the Iraq War as the book’s culminating break with reality (and it’s one of Richard Powers’ grimmest jokes when the lovable slaughterhouse-laborer and reservist Rupp packs off for the Middle East, expecting to return in a few weeks).

What does it mean to forget something you know, as Mark forgets his sister, his dog, and his home? In this book, I think it’s Richard Powers’ method not to address this question, but to turn it upside down, to make us realize that, from a neurological point of view, recognition is an act of synthesis, even an act of will. This is a large point. Like the pterodactyl living inside the sandhill crane, Mark Schluter lives inside us all.

Jenny Davidson writes:

I’ve got two things to contribute here: the first an observation (well, maybe a sequence of observations) and the second a question.

I found The Echo Maker an extremely moving and satisfying read. The Powers novel that I really particularly fell in love with (I read it pretty much in one greedy long sitting, I couldn’t believe how much it was the perfect novel) was The Time of Our Singing; I’m drawn in general to his style of fiction-writing, which is at once highly intellectual and extremely humane, but elsewhere I’ve sometimes felt the cerebral comes at the expense of the character development. I’m not sure The Echo Maker is quite as high up on my list of favorites as The Time of Our Singing (I’ve got a soft spot for novels about music, I’ve added that one to Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows and James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head as my top-favorite three best music-and-family novels of all time), but I found its contribution to the ongoing conversation in Powers’ fiction about human nature and human identity very compelling. It’s also becoming clearer to me that one of Powers’ great topics is the sibling relationship. I am a sister but not a wife, so I am especially pleased to read a novel (marriage is one of the novel’s all too classic topics, and I am often grumbling that not enough novelists — Muriel Spark is a striking exception — are interested in the dynamics of small groups or non-romantic pairs rather than sexually involved couples) that so thoughtfully explores the
same-generation familial bond.

I took the intellectual crux of the book to come when the narrative arrives at neurologist Gerald Weber’s doubts about the ways that “[i]maging and pharmaceuticals were opening the locked-room mystery of the mind”:

[S]ometing in him did not like where knowledge was heading. The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber. His field was succumbing to one of those ancient urges that it was supposed to shed light on: the herd mentality. As neuroscience basked in its growing instrumental power, Weber’s thoughts drifted perversely away from cognitive maps and neuron-level deterministic mechanisms toward emergent, higher-level psychological processes that could, on his bad days, sound almost like elan vital. But in the eternal split between mind and brain, psychology and neurology, needs and neurotransmitters, symbols and synaptic change, the only delusion
lay in thinking that the two domains would remain separate for much longer.

He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber’s tangled sybsystems bought the model; others wanted more. Now that the modular theory had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like the old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module. (189-90)

This seems to me to capture miraculously well both the pathos and the pull of old-fashioned depth psychology (even the term has an antiquated ring to it these days, it makes me think of the classic mid-twentieth-century discussions of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the workings of the first-person character soliloquy), as well as the lure of the new brain science. This takes me, though, to my question.

I’m completely addicted to popular science writing, especially to stuff about neurology and genetics. I like the way Powers handles Weber being an Oliver Sacks intellectual lookalike; it’s a running joke, people mistaking the doctor for the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife. One of the other neurologists Powers name-checks is V. S. Ramachandran, whose book Phantoms in the Brain really and seriously totally blew my mind when I read it. (If you have not read it, get it and read it at once, Ramachandran has a truly and endearingly dire sense of humor but the book is in every other respect pretty much perfect.) I can’t give the exact quotation here, since I’ve bought and given away several copies of the book since I initially read it, but the thing that absolutely transformed my notions about identity and consciousness (I’ve had a longstanding obsession with the phantom limb problem, starting with my intractable addiction to Locke’s chapter on personal identity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) was Ramachandran’s discussion of the confabulation of, say, a stroke patient unable to use a particular arm and in the grip of extraordinary forms of verbal rationalization for what feels to him- or herself like a decision not to act rather than an incapacity. This book also includes some of the mind-bending experiments with body parts and mirrors and boxes that Powers alludes to in the novel. But at times, particularly in the first half of the book, I wondered whether it’s really a good idea to rely so heavily on a relatively recent set of scientific developments that have already been so effectively popularized in non-fiction. If you’ve read Ramachandran and Sacks and others seriously (and these are, after all, bestsellers rather than obscure or long-ago writers), doesn’t it spoil some of your pleasure in the material? I especially felt that integrating this material in a third-person narrative is problematic. If it’s a first-person narrator, it makes sense in terms of that person’s, oh, enthusiasm or preoccupation with material that he or she can presumably have read about in the same books as the novel-reader. Any thoughts on the fiction/non-fiction question, and ways of handling this potential “seen it before” problem? One context for this kind of conversation might be the way similar questions arise around, oh, a novel like Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; this is a somewhat different question from the debate about using real people’s biographies in novels (David Leavitt and Stephen Spender, various people and Sylvia Plath, etc.). Alternately it might be more fruitful to consider it in the context of the nineteenth-century social novelists’ use of work from disciplines like economics and geology. Like my friend Steve Burt, who reviewed the novel for Slate this week, I found myself very much reminded me of George Eliot.

(This is the first in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.)

[This week marks the release of Richard Powers’ ninth novel, The Echo Maker. Recently nominated for the National Book Award, Powers’ novel chronicles a man named Mark Schluter, who gets into a truck accident. His sister Karin quits her job to take care of him and Mark awakens with Capgras Syndrome, believing Karin to be an impostor. From here, Mark, along with many of the book’s other characters, finds himself unable to distinguish the world around him. Through this deceptively simple concept, Powers unleashes an intricate and nuanced meditation on the nature of place and memory in our world. I enlisted several pals and Powers enthusiasts to discuss the novel. The results of these thoughts will appear here this week. Be sure to stay tuned on Friday, when Richard Powers himself will make an appearance, graciously contributing his own thoughts to the discussion. Many thanks to Ami Greko, James Meader, Richard Powers, and all of the participants for helping to make this discussion happen.]

Judith Zissman writes:

Hello. Thanks for inviting me to be the first to dive into the pool of incoherent rambling, Ed. Hopefully you can all join me here soon. Here goes.

I finished reading The Echo Maker in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. The next morning when I woke up, my brain had unearthed a line of Wallace Stevens in response: “Let be be finale of seem.” It sent me off into a recursive thought loop about the novel and about what it means to “be” and to “seem” — not just within the context of the novel, but with the dazzling chemical processes our brains go through to make memories, words, and stories — the echo making process of narrative.

The challenge is that the categories of “be” and “seem” are, of course, not fixed: not for the characters and not for us. We can complicate this further by sticking more ideas into categories [and some of the reviews of the book to date have done precisely that]: “natural” vs “artificial,” “healthy” vs “diseased,” “science” vs “art,” or we can do what I wanted to think Powers asked us to do, which is to understand that we only have “seem.”

We get more “seem” at every turn in the novel, from the central premise of Mark’s Capgras Syndrome to Bonnie’s job as a costumed historical reenactor to the mystery of Barbara’s identity, the revelation that there are multiple characters “working on a story” and, as Weber describes Barbara, “being a totally unreadable story.”

Unreadable and unreliable. And when I was thinking about all of this as I fell asleep after reading it, I wanted the novel itself to be more unreadable and unreliable, less resolved, less giving in to the underlying notion of what “actually happened.” I found myself disappointed by what I’d wanted Powers to do with this story — to resist the demands of narrative for resolution and closure, to leave things more broken.

And then I woke up with that damn Stevens line stuck in my head. And I thought about echo making — the neural and social processes by which we repeat perception into memory into stories into history — and felt sort of better about the idea of resolution. Perhaps in resisting a more semiotic “seem” for the less unresolved “be,” Powers calls our attention to this act of narrative and the power it holds over us.

So hey! All that and no mention of cranes! Your turn!

Jessica Stockton writes:

Judith, it’s interesting to me that you bring up this list of dichotomies: “be” and “seem,” “natural” vs. “artificial,” “healthy” vs. “diseased,” “science” vs. “art.” One of the little things that bothered me about Echo Maker (and I’m starting with the gripes, because it was so unusual to me not to feel that a Powers book was a perfect, complete work of art — I have to deal with feeling like I’m seeing the cracks in the surface, or the structure underneath) was that the two men in Karin’s life seemed like such a schematic opposition: Daniel the conservationist and Karsh the developer, the compassionate and the selfish, the ethical and the sexy. It seemed so obvious which one is bad news.

But as with my other favorite writer of ideas, Tom Stoppard, I think Powers’ oppositionals are never there to show us which side should win. They’re there to play with each other, to complicate each other, to converse with each other, and ultimately to make resolution impossible except maybe by way of a sort of Hegelian integration. Daniel’s ethical absolutism is unbearable and limiting: he ultimately can’t deal with the situation at hand because it would involve too many compromises. And Karsh isn’t an evil corporate shill, just a guy trying to do something big. They have to fight, because their two sides — me vs. the world, progress vs. tradition, saint vs. businessman, man vs. nature (remember junior high English class?) — are as old as history. Maybe they have to, ahem, echo off each other in order to make some meaning.

And Weber’s professional qualms are kind of about oppositionals too: hard science vs. anecdotal science, the statistic vs. the story. I’m not sure, obviously, but it seems like this must resonate for Powers personally as a writer who uses science in the service of story (The Nation‘s snarky
contention that it’s all about the ideas notwithstanding). As with Stoppard, I suspect writing about the two points of view is, for Powers, a way of wrestling them into some sort of understanding, or at least peace.

Personally, I’ve always been most interested in science when it serves as a metaphor: back to junior high again, this time chemistry, where the attractions of positive and negative particles were an irresistible image for a lovesick teenager hoping to make it with someone completely her
opposite. But it seems like such a project often gets dissed both by the science folks, who complain you’re missing the point of the facts, and the literature folks, who claim you’re more interested in the structure of the metaphor than in the emotional reality it’s attempting to describe. Kind of like being a Karin-level environmentalist, huh? — not serious enough for the fanatics, a little too crunchy-granola for the locals. But that in itself is a way of navigating a world of opposites, and maybe the only way to keep from becoming an extremist, an “if you’re not with us you’re against us” type, who can do no good to themselves or the world. Someone like Mark, maybe. Only extremism is a kind of craziness that seems to need no traumatic head injury to instigate it.

Point of my rambling is, I think Powers is one of that noble breed of novelists who call us, in the simplest terms, to see both sides of the argument, to open our tangled, self-justifying little brains to the possibility that someone else might (also) be right.

Sarah Weinman writes:

I wanted to jump off from Jessica’s point about “seeing the cracks in the surface.” Because isn’t that, in a way, what The Echo Maker is all about? Take Mark, a young man who ambled along throughout his life, doing his thing, not necessarily questioning. His structural map was intact, complete. And along comes this accident to completely throw him asunder, make him question the very bedrock of his identity, his family, his life. Take Karin, who is still battling to find out who she really is, and who so assumes roles familiar and not that it completely changes her perception of herself. Weber, too, being unnerved by Mark’s case that he’s questioning why he explores neurological impairment as he does, and even goes so far to wonder if he, himself, might be neurologically impaired.

Capgras is a fascinating syndrome on its own but, because Powers coupled it with bigger themes, greater explorations of identity, it becomes so resonant, so powerful that after I put the book down, I had a very strange experience. I’d read The Echo Maker to and from Madison, so deeply enmeshed in the book that surfacing to go to the bathroom became difficult. And when I arrived back in New York the place seemed different: not just because I’d endured two flights and switched a time zone after a very hectic weekend, but because even familiar locales seemed strangely foreign. The kicker was when I walked into my apartment, into my bedroom, and even though nothing had changed, I didn’t recognize it as my own.

Then everything snapped back into place, but the experience was unnerving. Situational Capgras? Some kind of momentary disconnection? I’ll never know. But I doubt that would have happened if I’d not read the book, with its meditations on levels of discontinuity.

So maybe Jessica saying that The Echo Maker “wasn’t a perfect form of art” is precisely the point of the book. I’ve not read his earlier work yet (something that will be rectified damn soon) but this novel seemed particularly accessible and poignant, a real study of human interaction, frailty and shifting landscapes. Everything is in flux; no one is as they seem. So I’m not sure that a perfect structure or a flawless work of art would necessarily have been the right approach. If the structural underpinnings weren’t 100%, well, maybe that’s more honest and realistic. And certainly more thought-provoking.

More later, but I’ll stop for now.