The Echo Maker
Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Hardcover, 451 pgs., $25

By SALLY JAMES
Contributing Writer

Mark Schluter flips his truck on a dark night into a field full of migrating sandhill cranes. What proceeds from his wreck, and the wreck of his life even before the crash, is a mystery. It twines together his sister, Karin, a nurse named Barbara, and an academic from hundreds of miles away named Gerald Weber.

Will the meatpacker ever recover from his coma? This brings a certain amount of medical suspense, but his brain-damaged self is often too slippery and ephemeral to understand. His sister, Karin, takes center stage instead. She is deliciously real as she leaves Mark’s side in the hospital and goes to his trailer-sized house to scrape the crusts of neglect off the floors and sinks: “She studied herself in the bathroom mirror as she cleaned the spatter-spots: a thirty-one year old professional soother, three and a half pounds overweight with red hair eighteen inches too long for her age, desperate for something to fix.”

As Mark wakes up from his coma and begins to speak and ask questions, he is diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a rare condition in which he believes his sister to be an imposter and can’t recognize her as his own relative. Instead, in the nursing home where Mark eventually lives, Barbara becomes his most trusted friend, using an almost disturbing level of dedication to vanquish some of his fears.

Famous scientist Weber comes to town to investigate, much like an old-fashioned big-city detective might arrive to solve a murder. He is bedazzled at first at what he calls “a chance to see through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was.”

After spending a long career cataloguing damaged minds, Weber sometimes has the detachment of a collector pinning a new dead butterfly in a case. But the treachery of Mark’s damaged mind, and the stark emotional impact that it has on Karin and others who love him, leave a stain on Weber, who finally decides, “He had come back not so much to document Mark as to help his story forward into the total unknown. Neuroscience might finally be powerless to settle this desperately improvising mind. But he might help Mark improvise.”

Each of our would-be heroes takes something from Mark’s metamorphosis and carries it into his or her own middle life. Gerald, Barbara, and Karin are twisted by the wreck as well, and throw pained energy back out into the world, changing other lives and revealing other truths. As Weber begins to question everything, he begins a college lecture, one of hundreds he has delivered. But now he sees the world differently, and he surveys the students in front of him with a new skepticism.

“The self was a mob, a drifting impoverished posse. That was the subject of today’s lecture, all the lectures he had given, since meeting his ruined Nebraska meatpacker. No self with out self-delusion.”

With exquisite prose, the author visits some of the ugliest corners of the psyche. Mark carries the same noble wisdom as one of Shakespeare’s fools.

Layered among this story of ruined lives and rebuilding selves are Powers’ many descriptions of the cranes and their migration. He writes poetically of the primal urges that carry the young cranes back again to the shallowest of rivers. On an airplane, returning to his wife, Weber thinks of the collective human past, lurking in the deepest part of the brain: “What the scans suggest he has seen up close, in the field, the older kin perching on his brain stem, circling back always, down along the bending water.”