"...a single, solid fiction always beat the truth out of our scattering."
THE ECHO MAKER
Richard Powers
The prose dazzles. A near-fatal car accident on a Nebraska road brings an esteemed cognitive neurologist into the lives of a family struggling to hold itself together in the wake of the car victim's accident-induced head injury and subsequent diagnosis of Capgras Syndrome. The main consequence of that head injury is that the car accident victim no longer recognizes his sister, mistaking her instead for an impostor wearing his sister's skin, whose looks and acts and sounds perfectly mimic his sister but are merely facsimiles of the real thing.
The story is smart in that it bristles with insight into the human condition, those cognitive functions and abilities and paradoxes we share with animals, and that make and unmake our selves and senses of self, but, for the most part, I was left cold. Perhaps there was too much philosophy--beautifully rendered and painfully incisive and intimately tied to character progressions, but philosophy nonetheless. Tied to the brother's injury and the sister's struggle to care for him while her own life collapses around her is the larger battle to preserve the natural resources in that small Nebraskan community, a patch of land that hosts an almost mystical annual migration of thousands of cranes. There is much about Man's conflict with the earth, hinting at perhaps our not even deserving this thing or our carelessness with this inheritance. And the book is rife with heartrending bits where the mind unmakes and remakes personal experience of the world, much of it captured in the sections concerning a character who could maybe have doubled for a more self-involved and less generous Oliver Sacks.
Pattern makes itself evident if one knows to look for it, and one gets the sense that this is an intricately structured book, its spine composed of a mystery out of which the narrative spirals, but often the structure eludes detection. The novel spans a year; perhaps my having been left cold is a result of those large chunks of flat prairie land where the plot is suspended or where the narrative dissolves and one is given to admiring the landscape or the migratory movements of animals and elegant phrases, sight-seeing. Flyover country is beautiful, can be, but more often than not, it is a way-station for people going somewhere. Tire tracks or a trail of smoke as evidence of passing. I suspect the fault I find with this novel is that it wasted too much gas, idling.
Richard Powers
The prose dazzles. A near-fatal car accident on a Nebraska road brings an esteemed cognitive neurologist into the lives of a family struggling to hold itself together in the wake of the car victim's accident-induced head injury and subsequent diagnosis of Capgras Syndrome. The main consequence of that head injury is that the car accident victim no longer recognizes his sister, mistaking her instead for an impostor wearing his sister's skin, whose looks and acts and sounds perfectly mimic his sister but are merely facsimiles of the real thing.
The story is smart in that it bristles with insight into the human condition, those cognitive functions and abilities and paradoxes we share with animals, and that make and unmake our selves and senses of self, but, for the most part, I was left cold. Perhaps there was too much philosophy--beautifully rendered and painfully incisive and intimately tied to character progressions, but philosophy nonetheless. Tied to the brother's injury and the sister's struggle to care for him while her own life collapses around her is the larger battle to preserve the natural resources in that small Nebraskan community, a patch of land that hosts an almost mystical annual migration of thousands of cranes. There is much about Man's conflict with the earth, hinting at perhaps our not even deserving this thing or our carelessness with this inheritance. And the book is rife with heartrending bits where the mind unmakes and remakes personal experience of the world, much of it captured in the sections concerning a character who could maybe have doubled for a more self-involved and less generous Oliver Sacks.
Pattern makes itself evident if one knows to look for it, and one gets the sense that this is an intricately structured book, its spine composed of a mystery out of which the narrative spirals, but often the structure eludes detection. The novel spans a year; perhaps my having been left cold is a result of those large chunks of flat prairie land where the plot is suspended or where the narrative dissolves and one is given to admiring the landscape or the migratory movements of animals and elegant phrases, sight-seeing. Flyover country is beautiful, can be, but more often than not, it is a way-station for people going somewhere. Tire tracks or a trail of smoke as evidence of passing. I suspect the fault I find with this novel is that it wasted too much gas, idling.