2mg

Following a car crash on an icy road, a young man is taken to a hospital where he gradually comes out of a comatose state. Suffering from a brain injury, he has no memory of the details of his accident. More disquieting, while he has no trouble recognizing his friends, he is suffering from an uncommon psychological condition termed “Capgras delusion,” causing him to believe that his sister is not really his sister, but an imposter posing as his sister. While some of the narrative is from the point of view of the brother (with several interesting stream-of-consciousness passages representing his emergence from his coma), much of it is from the point of view of the sister, and it is in these passages that Powers makes his most interesting points about identity: although in many instances the sister tries to find ways to prove to her brother that she is who she says she is, in others we see her adjusting to her brother’s delusional beliefs, resulting in her questioning her own identity. A third character, a neurologist whom the sister contacts to work with her and her brother, supplies an additional perspective on the theme of self and the identity, and while much of his commentary reflects scientific views on the brother’s psychological disorder, the neurologist’s perspective is not entirely one of critical distance inasmuch as he is experiencing an identity crisis of his own. Thus, Powers constructs an interesting triangle in which the doubts and frustrations of each character function to comment on the other characters. While Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, narrating the early history of DNA research, contains a lot of scientific discourse, and his Prisoner's Dilemma, with its exploration of the stories families tell about themselves to one another, is formally innovative, The Echo Maker seems a rather conventional novel. There is some scientific discourse, but not as much as I was expecting, and there is little experimentation with narrative form. For me, the novel is flawed. A lot of it seems extra-ordinarily true-to-life, particularly the psychological tensions among the various characters; in this respect it reminded me of some of the best work of Philip Roth. However, there were some events in the action that seemed like things that could only happen in a novel, and juxtaposed to the realism of the rest of the work, they seemed artificial and forced.

2022-11-14 18:04