The Echo Maker: A Novel by Richard Powers Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Echo Maker: A Novel
Book Review: I loved this book
Summary: 5 Stars
I found The Echo Maker beautiful and engaging, especially in the portrait of the Platte River, which I remember as a loyal companion in drives across country. I am surprised by the bitterness of some of the negative reviews. It's hard not to imagine Mr. Powers reading them, as Gerald Weber did. Oh well, different strokes...Book Review: Power's best is unstoppable
Summary: 5 Stars
Richard Power's ninth novel is his best. Bettering his previous efforts, the prose is spare and precise, the plot compelling and the themes grand but accessible. The National Book Award winner - also short-listed for the Pulitzer - is an epic voyage and return tale, where every character, including the cranes that open the novel, go through a miraculous and unpredictable journey. The narrative opening - the brother nearly killed in a car accident who can't recognise his caring sister - is beautifully developed and unwinds in unexpected and profound directions. Unforgettable.
Book Review: Why The National Book Award Doesn't Mean Much
Summary: 3 Stars
I always jump on a new Richard Powers novel as soon as it comes out in paper. However this time I was a bit anxious because `The Echo Maker' had won the 2006 National Book Award. If you want to see what I mean, go to the NBA's Web site (http://www.nationalbook.org/) and see how many of the past winners you've read, enjoyed, or even heard of. For some reason the NBA normally goes to some incredibly boring jeremiad on the angst of being a middle class white man in America. While `The Echo Maker' is thankfully not that, it is my least favorite of all of Mr. Power's novels.
I'm not sure why literary critics like books like this. The plot is interesting and weaves, in Mr. Powers' normal fashion, elements of life, science, and philosophy in an articulate manner. However in his past books I always had the feeling that Mr. Powers really had a gut understanding of the science and was able to reflect on it in such a way as to make us see the relevance to everyday lives; this is not the case with `The Echo Maker.' You more or less get the feeling that the science, neurophysiology in this case, was a `cut and paste' from Web sites. Also at least some of the information about Sandhill Cranes, an important part of the plot, was either out of date or misinformed.
Having said all this I still recommend this book for many reasons. Richard Powers is in my opinion, one of the very best novelists writing in America today. His work is solid and will stand the test of time. Why his much superior previous works were not given the attention of this one I attribute more to the strange tastes of the literati than to Powers' talent. Obviously some Amazon readers really liked this book and one review said the important thing to me; if this is the first Richard Powers' book you read it will likely make you want to read more.
Book Review: Where did Richard Powers grow up?
Summary: 4 Stars
This was the fifth book I've read from Powers, and I would say that it is the least soulful but the most place-ful. That might say more about me than about the book, however. I think some of Powers's female characters are starting to run together and disappear into one another. Thus, I can't give 'The Echo Maker' five stars.
The great literary account of Nebraska is worth three stars by itself. I was born and raised in Nebraska and Powers's descriptions of the horizons, the despicable yet respectable people, and the general decay of the physical environment sent shivers down my spine at multiple points throughout the story.
The fourth star is a practical consideration. This is the quickest read of any of Powers's books I've read, so I was happy to recommend it to friends as a good point of entry for his other works.
Book Review: Too long for the brief story
Summary: 3 Stars
If you spent a week reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat while watching the Hallmark Channel, you might end up writing this novel. Mark Shluter has crashed his truck and his sister, Karin, quits her job and dumps her boyfriend to take care of him. But Mark suffered a brain injury in the accident and insists that his sister is not his sister but someone pretending to be his sister. A famous neurologist, Gerald Weber, arrives to see Mark so he can write about him in his next book. And some cranes fly through town on their way to Alaska.
The main problem with the story is that Powers does nothing with the story. His characters are uninteresting to start with and are completely unbelievable. They don't react to situations, they overreact. Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. And Powers doesn't tell a story, too often he tells us about a story. For example, when Weber goes on a television show, we only find out that he embarrasses himself during the interview but not what he said that was so terrible that it destroyed sales of his book. Weber, a crucial character in the story, is the weakest written character in the book. It is virtually impossible to justify or understand his actions. And if two people have sex in the mud, don't you think they might want to shower or at least change their clothes before going off to lunch and then on to some tourist attraction?
There are some good parts of the book. The mystery of the letter left at the hospital is interesting and is wrapped up quite nicely. In a clever and effective technique, Powers writes alternating sections from the point of view of the various characters. But the book would have been much better if Powers had reduced the length by about 200 pages. I found myself becoming bored with the characters and the story. Serious editing and the elimination of certain story threads could have kept the book short enough to make us not care that the characters are completely unlikeable and unbelievable. But at 450 pages, the holes in the characters shine through.