Venus Rising

Film & BooksIssue: Capricorn 07

The Echo Maker

The “echo maker” is the Ojibwa-Anishinabe American Indian name for the endangered sandhill cranes. Kearney, Nebraska is the setting of this novel. The only reason one would go to this rural town would be to see these magnificent birds, which are, in many ways, the identity of this community and a hub for various story lines throughout. 

The Echo Maker By Richard Powers. 451 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Mark Schluter is a car-loving, truck-driving, 27-year-old slaughterhouse mechanic. When he accidentally roles his truck on a desolate road one cold night, he is pretty much left for dead. An anonymous phone call brings the police to him just in time to save his life, a life that he will no longer be able to recognize or embrace, a life that will no longer be his. His sister and his only next-of-kin, Karin, returns to town to see him. Both their parents are dead and respectively the siblings’ memories of their parent’s idealism are at the crux of the internal conflict within each of them. Their father was of the get-rich-quick mentality; he couldn’t manage money and his home sank into a state of filth and disrepair. Their mother was of the “save-me-Jesus” fanaticism mentality, and was able to leave some money to her children but suffered a drawn out and painful death to do so. Both parents were emotionally unstable thus each of their children are equally as confused, but as Karin tells her brother during his recovery, “Family is our country.”  Karin and Mark, though Mark is unable to articulate it, find footing and are grounded in their roots. 

Mark soon finds out that he suffers from Capgras Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Because of this disorder, Mark believes that Karin is an impostor, a stand-in for his real sister. Mark cannot embrace her love and he shuns her. Karin is devastated and writes to the ‘Famous Gerald’ Weber, a cognitive neurologist known for his case studies describing brain disorders. Weber’s presence only exacerbates the miscommunication because his own identity crisis clouds his work with Mark. Here Powers is intimating that such brain disorders, such conflict within one’s self, are the crutch that binds humanity. Mark’s professional, academic, and personal choices may be the antithesis of Weber’s but it is Mark, the patient, who in the end illuminates what it means to be alive and to be human to the overly researched scientist known as Famous Gerald. 

Part of the joy of reading Powers' work is the stimulation that is gained from his references. Mark receives a copy of Willa Cather’s "My Antonia." He reads it and then gives it to Weber, a well-researched neuroscientist, not necessarily a well-read individual. Cather’s novel is set at a time when the West was being settled at the expense of the indigenous cultures. Her novel has been explained to be a “sort of elegy for the way of a life almost vanished at the time of its writing.”  One might make the same conclusion upon reading "The Echo Maker." Now an endangered species, the ‘echo makers’ sonorous calls are barely heard against the skyscrapers. 

Powers also uses the friendships in the novel to acknowledge the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. Just weeks after the anniversary of 9/11, Mark and Karin realize the proximity between the night of Mark’s accident and the date of the attacks. Then, throughout Mark’s return to life as he thought he knew it, Powers references the march to war in Iraq. His plot brings to focus life post 9/11 without assigning the regret of the Schluter’s personal catastrophe to that of the nation’s misfortunes. Here, he achieves something magnificent. He forces the reader to reflect - to ponder the elements of perseverance and preservation of one’s self in the midst of all that surrounds. Powers wrote, and I conclude with his words, “Extinction is short; migration is long.”  As long as the birds migrate, the birds will find water and water is what sustains life.

And, Powers’ literary talent is what sustains the life of a thinking reader.