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The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers
A young man awakens from a 2-week coma--the result of a truck accident--only to discover that he has a rare brain disorder called Capgras syndrome, that causes him to think that his sister is an imposter. What ensues is a complex mystery.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages
10/17/2006
$25.00
ISBN: 0374146357
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
I know of no other contemporary American novelist who demands so much attention from his readers and then gives back twofold or better. And The Echo Maker is a brilliant novel, even when its technical clunkers slow it down a bit.
The New York Times Book Review Colson Whitehead
Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms.
Booklist Keir Graff
Powers has complete command of storytelling skills, building questions of both plot and philosophy so deftly that, in their denouemont, there is no surprise, only recognition. A remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it. [1 Aug 2006, p.43]
Kirkus Reviews
Issues of environmental stewardship and rapine, compulsions implicit in migratory patterns and Weber's changing concept of the fluid, susceptible nature of the self are sharply dramatized in a fascinating dance of ideas. [15 July 2006, p.696]
Publishers Weekly
MacArthur fellow Powers (Gold Bug Variations, etc.) masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose--powerful, but not overbearing -- brings a sorrowful energy to every page. [10 July 2006, p.48]
The Guardian Patrick Ness
For this, finally, is a novel of unseemly richness and complexity, never dry or condescending, always weaving its way towards an unsettling emotional climax.
New York Review Of Books Margaret Atwood
The Echo Maker is a grand novel -- grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning. That it might sometimes stray over the line into the grandiose is perhaps unavoidable.
Los Angeles Times Albert Mobilio
In The Echo Maker, Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel's abiding theme -- what it means to be human will forever elude us. [1 Oct. 2006, p.R12]
Library Journal Stephen Morrow
Powers bounces back and forth through Mark's rambling thoughts, Weber's neurological theories, Karin's insecurities, and wonderfully poetic details of the cranes on the Platte River. [1 July 2006, p.70]
The Spectator Patrick Skene Catling
Powers writes best about what interests him most, the human brain. This is a brainy novel. After I read about Dr Weber's diagnoses and prescriptions, from echolalia to Cotard's syndrome, nobody could say how many of my 100 billion brain cells I had used up. However many, I feel that the expenditure was well worthwhile. [30 Dec 2006]
The New Yorker
Powers’s smooth coincidences and cute patter can be unconvincing and leaden, and he has a tendency to lapse into distracting repetitions. Yet his philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.
Washington Post Sebastian Faulks
This complicated story is masterfully controlled; the pace never slackens; the writing remains direct and clear.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
There's far too much happening in The Echo Maker (an environmental kerfuffle, several romances, a mystery woman), but the chaotic novel is nonetheless one of the year's most engrossing.
San Francisco Chronicle William Kowinski
Powers' prose is sensual and musical; he writes mostly believable characters, and he structures the story to meet a reader's needs as well as satisfy his more subtle purposes.
Slate Stephen Burt
Powers wants to know not how and why we fall apart, amid paranoid systems, but how (with the help of the arts and the sciences) we might put one another together. His subject is not collapse but convalescence, and so reading Powers feels less like reading (say) Gravity's Rainbow than it feels like reading Middlemarch.
Houston Chronicle Patrick Kurp
His cast is small but Powers' narrative is sprawling and, I'm sorry to say, often portentous and melodramatic. I say I'm sorry because there's much to enjoy and admire in The Echo Maker.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Catherine Bush
More specifically, I found myself resisting a certain facility. Facility? The sense of being in the hands of a novelist who already knows how to write a kind of book, however complex, so that while reading you are always aware of the writer in control of his narrative. There's something a little too smooth about it.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Powers' effort to link the two processes -- the disturbance of the natural world, the disturbance of the mind -- shows some strain. [19 Nov 2006, p.5]
The Independent James Urquhart
The Echo Maker is another solid achievement for Powers, but again with a hint that with tighter editing he could produce something even better.
The Nation William Deresiewicz
The range and magnitude of Powers's talents are not in question. What's in question is the kind of work he uses them to produce.
Wall Street Journal Matt Murray
As the fight over the cranes rages, Mr. Powers ill-advisedly pushes his plot even further, revealing that one character has had a secret agenda all along. This improbable development throws a new light on Mark's accident and injects an element of cheesy mystery into what is intended as a serious look at selfhood. It's the final disappointment in a disappointing book.
 The average user rating for this book is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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