Michelangelo Paints a House : Review of Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’ National Book Award winning novel, Echo Maker, showcases most every fault the author’s fictions have shown up to now, and virtually none of their strengths. From any other writer, Echo Maker would be a qualified success, but there’s only failure here for Powers: anything good in the book he has done better elsewhere and the low points descend below any previous nadirs.

You should not read this book with a beer: you must. And since it’s won a great award, the award with the best track history of late for American fiction, you will read this book, and you should do so only under the influence of alcohol. The beer of choice here is Belhaven’s Twisted Thistle IPA. I’ll give it a full review later, but it’s a tremendous beer: a smooth, rich surprisingly complex IPA, with little of the trademark IPA hoppy bitterness. It’s smoothness and sweetness make it akin to Bridgeport IPA in a superficial way, but it replaces that beer’s floral notes with something I can’t quite place without a bottle in front of me, so I’ll just shut up for now. Available at Beaumont Market and at the new Belmont Station sometime soon. Buy an imperial pint immediately for $3.29 or sleep with others for money until you do have the dough, because it’s amazing.

Echo Maker’s premise is interesting enough: a man (almost definitely under the influence of alcohol) crashes his car in a mysterious accident, in the dead of night, and any other details are sketchy, at best. After suffering a head trauma, Mark awakens in the hospital days later, refusing to believe that close loved ones are really who they appear to be. He surmises instead that they are elaborate impostors. The adjective to describe this setup is neat— it’s all kinds of interesting, especially since the crux of his Capgras syndrome (the term for this very real and very rare disorder) lies in Mark’s inability to ascribe any emotion to the dead ringer at his hospital bed. His sister looks just like his sister, but he feels nothing like what he would really feel if he saw his real sister, so his damaged brain crosses the emotional gap with the elaborate fantasy that she must be a fake.

The themes of identity, love in the post-industrial age, emotions real and imagined, the essential nature of man’s need to belong, the balance we all strike of head versus heart, whether we can know something in our heart (for real) and what it means to say that we can, and whether or not our brain assigns essential meaning to intrinsic familial relationships could all of have been explored in the novel, but none are, at least not to any satisfaction. What you have is a plot heavy, smart-alecky-in-the-worst-sense, plodding novel that attempts to simulate varying brain stages through three inert, flat characters. It’s masterful at times as a prose exercise, but an absolute chore to read.

The biggest problem is Mark’s sister, Karin. Powers has a bit of a track history with being accused by critics (somewhat unfairly, up to now) of having uncommonly intelligent characters, who seem a bit too encyclopedic for their own novel. Karin’s completely unconvincing as a 30 something Gateway customer service rep, who is supposedly relatively uneducated. Upon first acquaintance with her brother’s condition, she reads every last piece of literature she can get her hands on, understands it completely on first read, and asks the neurologists all the right questions. If she were this smart, she’d be smart. Powers takes pains to paint her as an average mind at best, yet she’s clearly not. Why not just give her an Ivy league education and an PhD in physics and have her be believable?

Powers knows better. His last novel, The Time of Our Singing, was 7 oodles and 4 tons superior to this, and you should read that instead. Yet, with all this negativity, Powers remains one of the best writers alive--words I don’t throw around casually--and this book has its moments. Still, whether or not you're new to Powers, you'll be really underwhelmed and struggle to finish this one.

Book Rating : 3

Beer Rating = Belhaven Twisted Thistle IPA: 7