The Echo Maker

by: Richard Powers

Published by: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

2006 National Book Award Winner

Powers, author of The Gold Bug Variations and Gain, has again created a powerful, intricate novel of ideas, images and place.

The location is the shrinking and shallow Platte River in Nebraska, the resting place twice a year for crane migrations. The tale is of Mark Schluter, a worker in a meat packing plant, who has rolled his truck on a dark, empty and freezing Nebraska road, and has suffered serious head trauma.

Mark's sister Karin returns home to care for him, only to find he no longer really truly sees her as his sister--he is suffering from an obscure condition called Capgras syndrome. He thinks she is an imposter. He feels his dog, his home, his neighborhood, much of his life--is a parallel universe, fake, created for some unfathomable reason.

Mark clings to a note left by his bedside: "I am No One but tonite on North Line Road. GOD led me to you so You could live and bring back someone else." Mark tries to figure out the author of this note, and what it means, as he struggles to manage his day-to-day existence on disability, with the help of his suffering pseudo-sister and his friends.

Gerald Weber, a famous best-selling author and cognitive neurologist, visits them several times, as Mark's life slowly falls apart. Bit by bit the mystery is revealed, as the cranes return, and Karin takes up with old boyfriends: Daniel the tireless advocate for the Crane Refuge, and Robert, the developer and manipulator of facts.

What caused the accident? Who else was there? Who really is the brilliant nurse's aide who seems so attached to Mark? What is real? What affects our perceptions?

This book surely deserves the honor of a National Book Award.

Armchair Interviews says: This book deserves to be read and discussed as well as part of a book club.