Minds Matter
WILSON, JOHN
Minds Matter A novelist explores the territory of the brain. by John Wilson Late on a freezing February night, a man in his late twenties rolls his truck on an "arrow-straight country road"...
...So there has been a Fall...
...At which point you may very well want to go back to page one and start rereading...
...If these symptoms persist, call your neurologist...
...Mark's delusion about his sister turns out to be an instance of Capgras syndrome, an affliction rare enough to lure neu-roscientist and bestselling writer Gerald Weber—whose latest book is just appearing—from New York to the Great Plains...
...by John Wilson Late on a freezing February night, a man in his late twenties rolls his truck on an "arrow-straight country road" outside Kearney, Nebraska...
...Mark Schluter, desperately improvising conspiracy theories, is making up a self on the fly, as we all do...
...Certainly not...
...I hear you groaning, Dear Reader...
...Where did it come from...
...One of the Anishinaabe clans was named the Cranes—Ajijak or Busi-nasee—the Echo Makers," Powers writes: When animals and people all spoke the same language, crane calls said exactly what they meant...
...Now we live in unclear echoes...
...There's nothing facile in his sense of the human plight, and the cranes point beyond themselves...
...Mark's accident occurs during the annual migratory visit of the sandhill cranes, who descend en masse on the Platte River and tarry there for a few weeks en route to northern climes...
...The river is threatened by development, meaning that the cranes are in jeopardy, too...
...Luria, the legendary Soviet neurosci-entist, and a leading character clearly inspired by Oliver Sacks, Powers's book is, in part, the most impressive attempt to date to take the mind-boggling findings of contemporary brain science and flesh them out...
...That's a puzzle entwined with another, sufficient to keep the reader turning the pages to the very end, when all is revealed...
...We're simply unaware of most of the routine decoding...
...But if he intends, simultaneously, to affirm the mysterious continuity of the self while pressing us to see how that self is never static, never achieved once and for all, then he's The Echo Maker by Richard Powers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $25 prodding us helpfully, as Hugh Ken-ner did when he said that there is no such thing as "plain English," that reading an ordinary sentence is more or less as demanding as reading a line from Finnegans Wake...
...When Mark, her brain-injured brother, comes out of his coma, he claims that she is an imposter, not really his sister, and no matter how much she protests and pleads with him, no matter what tidbits of obscure family lore she dredges up, he is unswerving...
...Such is the premise of The Echo Maker, winner of the National Book Award...
...ing the severity of the accident, her brother—though badly battered—is exceptionally fortunate, his condition stable...
...The Echo Maker brilliantly shows various minds in the act of making sense or suddenly losing the seemingly effortless art of perception and understanding—so persuasively, in fact, that the book should perhaps come with a warning sticker, explaining that you may look up from reading and fail to recognize, for a moment, the dearly familiar face across from you, or find yourself in what seems to be an utterly strange place...
...But the enigmatic note that Karin finds at her brother's bedside hints that there is yet reason for hope...
...But when she returns to the hospital later in the day, after getting some sleep, her brother's condition has inexplicably worsened, dramatically so...
...But Powers has more on his mind...
...Don't be so hasty to conclude that Powers would merely irritate you...
...Next to his bed she finds a cryptic note scrawled in a "spidery" hand: I am No One but tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else...
...For most writers this would be enough—more than enough—to fuel a novel, especially given the moral complexity of Gerald Weber, who comes to feel that he has exploited the subjects of his books, and the tangled histories of Karin and Mark and those close to them...
...ConsiderJohn Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture...
...Any arguments with that...
...Is there redemption...
...If he is intending to argue that the continuity of the self is finally an illusion, the way that various savants these days are telling us that free will is an illusion conjured by evolution for its own purposes, consciousness itself an expedient illusion to mask the unruly modular machinery that does the real work—if this is the point, let us dissent...
...And what Powers suggests is that such freakish disorders are not so far removed as we suppose from the ordinary business of consciousness...
...With an epigraph from A.R...
...The turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah...
...Karin, the sister, tries unsuccessfully to find out who left the note, but soon a more grotesque enigma preoccupies her...
...Powers seems at pains to emphasize that what we have in mind is the crabbed fundamentalist faith of Karin and Mark's mother...
...His sister, several hours away, gets a call from the hospital and arrives not long after dawn...
...You are already weary of the latest vogue in fictional villainy, which brings us a seemingly endless succession of interchangeable despoilers, guilty of crimes against Nature...
...Only people fail to recall the order of the Lord...
...How this cashes out for Richard Powers I'm not entirely sure...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 19
