The Echo Maker

Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for his new novel, The Echo Maker. Powers writes science fiction at its most literal and important level: he interweaves scientific sub-plots (the nature of consciousness, the genetic code, the curvature of space-time, the logic of computer programming) with a deep concern for the inner life of his characters. There are no aliens, or distant galaxies; just the human mind pulsing on the page. I'm a big fan of Powers, and The Echo Maker is my new favorite (The Gold Bug Variations are a close second.)

The Echo Maker begins with a car crash, which is witnessed only by migrating cranes. Mark, the driver of the totaled pick-up truck, is plunged into a coma. When he awakes he is suffering from Capgras syndrome, a form of emotional amnesia where everything one loves suddenly seems unreal. Mark sees his sister, but says she is "pretend". He recognizes his dog, but says it isn't his dog. Even his trailer is just a phony replica of his "real" trailer, which has gone somewhere else. His whole world is just an ersatz copy of itself.

Freudian psychiatrists have long held that the source of Capgras syndrome is sexual repression. When a son recognizes his sexual lust for his mother, he is forced to respond by denying the reality of his mother. The dissonance of wanting your mom and being jealous of your father is just too much for the super-ego to control. So we deny and repress, repress and deny.

Like so many Freudian explanations, this analysis is brilliant, but completely wrong. Capgras syndrome has a distinct neurobiological source. It results from a disconnect between the parts of your brain involved in visual recognition ("that is my mother") and the parts of your brain that detect emotion ("I love my mother"). When the recognition is severed from its emotional resonances, the conscious self responds by denying the authenticity of what you recognize. ("That can't be my Mom, since her face doesn't make me feel anything.") It's the sort of syndrome that was made for a novelist like Powers. He uses the tragic disease to explore all sorts of subtle ideas, like the foibles and limits of human communication, and the fragile nature of the mind itself. Disconnect a few wires, and love itself becomes a chimera.

This exegesis could go on and on (the book is that dense), but I'll end by telling you about Gerald Weber - "the natty neuroscientist" and pseudo Oliver Sacks - who flies into the little Midwestern town and starts treating Mark. According to Weber, "a single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering". In other words, there is something inexplicable at the center of our existence, a ghost lurking in our intricate machine. Powers reminds us that some questions don't have answers, and that we are the answer to a question we can't even ask. The Echo Maker reminds us why we need novels. As Wallace Stevens said, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else."

PS. If you want to know more about Capgras syndrome, read Phantoms in the Brain

PPS. If you want to know more about Richard Powers, read this interview in the Paris Review. Here's a sample:

INTERVIEWER
What caused you to leave physics?

POWERS
The further into physics I went, the more I felt I was in danger of becoming the quintessential hedgehog, learning more and more about less and less until I would know everything about nothing. I could see down the path and see what a life in science would be like. Then I took this freshman honors' seminar survey of English lit with Robert Schneider. I thought, here is a guy with a multivalent look at literature, who has a kind of synthetic vision of lots of
different ages, lots of different perspectives. I felt literature was the place for the grand synthetic aerial view I was in danger of losing if I stayed with physics. But after I got my graduate degree in literature, I started to feel the same thing--that the path to success in that discipline also involved a great deal of specialization. And that's when I left school.