THE ECHO MAKER
by Richard Powers
I doubt I've ever read a book I more wanted to stop reading, yet kept on doggedly to the end. I wanted the answer to the books central question: How do we know who we are? I didn't get it.
Powers' account of midwestern life, the pointlessness of it, is accurate, especially at the low end of the income range where his Nebraskans live. The 30-ish main character, Mark, is employed repairing machinery at a cattle-killing plant. He suffers head trauma following an auto accident. His sister, Karin, returns to the town of their childhood, Kearney, Nebraska, to care for him.
Contrast all of this against the story of the cranes who stop every year in the town on their migration route.
Contrast Mark's memory losses following the accident against the cranes' memory which drives them over thousands of miles of migration.
Contrast the loss of the family farms against the loss of the cranes' habitat.
Powers should have had enough material. But he laboriously treats each individual plot thread, failing in the end to tie any of it together. The reader must plow through 451 pages of Powers' apparent enthrallment with his own voice to reach an ending of continued loss and hopelessness.
Following his injury, Mark suffers from Capgras syndrome. He does not recognize his sister, believing instead that she is an imposter pretending to be his sister. His sister, Karin, acts in any way necessary to gain the approval of others. The specialist Karin calls in is a prominent expert (very like Oliver Sacks), who is insecure and confused. The nurse aid who befriends Mark is not who she seems to be. His closest friends are mindless gamers. None of these characters is made likeable, or even convincing.
In the end, the changes wrought in the main character are brought about, not through the events of the story, but by drugs and other medical intervention. The other characters have only become more aimless and grey, their lives more humiliating.
Though the book was well researched, one felt that Powers was writing about people and places he doesn't really know, for all of the hundreds of pages he devotes to their inner thoughts. His characters form relationships based on nothing known or explained. I would guess that he has done intense study of the brain and consciousness, and that his interest in those areas possibly caused him to put too much of it into the book. His narrative is exhaustive and in the end exhausting to read.
Possibly less narrative and more character interaction and dialog would have helped. At the end, Karin takes the neurologist to see the cranes. She is telling him of her father bringing her and Mark as children to this same place. "The three of us at dawn, still happy. And my father, still the wisest man alive." These two sentences say everything about human memory. We all have that memory of a time when everything was pure. The time before we learned the truth about humanity.
© 2006
|
THE WELSH GIRL
Peter Ho Davies
Houghton Mifflin Company, New York
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-0700-4; ISBN-10: 0-618-00700-8
$24.00, 2007, 333 pages (Hardcover)
Because I have read short stories by Peter Ho Davies in various publications, I was able to overcome my usual aversion to the World War II setting and read this novel anyway. I was not disappointed. This writing is flawless, and he brings the war into the story only as it brings people together and forces them apart, as it changes perceptions of home, family, freedom, and country. His focus is not on history, but rather on the very personal ways history changes individuals.
Davies made me care about his characters. Esther, the young Welsh woman living on a sheep farm in Wales, and Karsten, the German soldier who needs her help to escape the prisoner-of-war camp abutting her father's sheep grazing fields, are brought to life in situations neither would have dreamed possible. War forces them into situations that require them in very different ways, to redefine the principles and ethics which govern their lives. They grow to become more admirable in the short time allotted by the author. Each challenges in his or her own way the boundaries within which they live, and each moves beyond the war with dignity.
The questions asked by this book are the big ones. It questions honor and bravery, surrender and escape, success and failure, in a time when it seems one might only be admired for dying. Davies speaks of all these complicated issues and relationships with a calm simplicity that makes the reading effortless. One sinks into the story, feels surrounded by it, and is allowed total escape into the world he has created. The end comes much too soon.
The book's ending isn't the tidy one most authors would have written. But such an ending would have diminished the book's narrative power. Instead, Davies has shown that, even within the small lives most of us live, we may surprise ourselves in unexpected ways. There is no simple definition of courage.
|
