The Echo Maker

Saturday, Oct. 31, 2015--San Antonio

I finished reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers this evening.  It won the National Book Award several years ago.  The book is very well written and has a quite complex structure.  It starts with a man who is involved in a car crash in Nebraska and suffers neurological damage that leaves him unable to recognize the most loved individuals in his life--his sister and his dog.  He has delusions that they have been replaced by almost-perfect duplicates in some bizarre scheme.  Other aspects of the novel include a neurologist famous for his popular books that describe symptoms of various patients, a developer who wants to build on land that an environmentalist and his group is trying to protect for the birds who migrate through there regularly, a nurse's aide at the hospital who everyone recognizes as working "below what ought to be her station in life."   I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative, but I got quite bored at times with the details of the previous case studies being discussed by the neurologist.  So my summary is that it soars and it bores, but it soars more than it bores.  I gave it 3 stars out of 4.