''The Echo Maker'' is a 2006 novel by American writer Richard Powers. It won the

National Book Award for Fiction The National Book Award for Fiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which recognize outstanding literary work by United States citizens. Since 1987 the awards have been administered and presented by the National Book Foundation, but ...

National Book Foundation The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...

. Retrieved 2012-03-27.
(With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) and was a

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, published durin ...

finalist."Fiction"
''Past winners & finalists by category''. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-27.

Plot introduction

On a winter night on a remote

Nebraska Nebraska () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by South Dakota to the north; Iowa to the east and Missouri to the southeast, both across the Missouri River; Kansas to the south; Colorado to the sout ...

road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman — who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister — is really an impostor. Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive

neurologist Neurology (from el, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the brain, the spinal c ...

Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing brain disorders. Weber recognized Mark's condition as a rare case of

Capgras syndrome Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor. It is named after Joseph Capgras ( ...

— the delusion that people in one's life are doubles or impostors — and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident.

Characters

Main characters

* Karin Schluter quits her job as a service representative to return home to

Kearney, Nebraska Kearney is the county seat of Buffalo County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 30,787 in the 2010 census. It is home to the University of Nebraska at Kearney. The westward push of the railroad as the Civil War ended gave new birt ...

to care for her comatose brother. * Mark Schluter has a mysterious truck rollover on a deserted country road and eventually comes out of a coma suffering from a variety of delusions. * Gerald Weber is a popular writer of books on neurology who answers a personal email from Karin requesting that he come to Nebraska. Weber may be a partial fictionalization of

Oliver Sacks Oliver Wolf Sacks, (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in Britain, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the Uni ...

, 1933–2015, who was a neurologist, best-selling author, and professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine. Sacks was the author of a number of nonfiction books, beginning with ''

Awakenings ''Awakenings'' is a 1990 American drama film directed by Penny Marshall. It is written by Steven Zaillian, who based his screenplay on Oliver Sacks's 1973 memoir '' Awakenings''. It tells the story of neurologist Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Willia ...

'' (1973) and '' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'' (1985), which use case histories interwoven with explanatory narrative to describe a range of brain conditions that result in unusual manifestations of neurologic deficits, in much the way Weber does in ''The Echo Maker.''

Analysis

According to Richard Powers,Richard Powers
"Echo Maker Roundtable #5"
20 October 2006 In a review in the ''New York Review of Books,''

Margaret Atwood Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, ...

described the novel's "underlying sketch" as being from ''

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' is a children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. It is the first novel in the Oz series of books. A Kansas farm girl named Dorothy ends up in the magical Land of Oz afte ...

''.

Colson Whitehead Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work '' The Intuitionist''; '' The Underground Railroad'' (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Awar ...

, writing in ''The New York Times'', called it a "post-911 novel .. not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day."

"Migratory Spirits"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', 22 October 2006

References

External links

Fresh Air," December 12, 2006, radio interview with Richard Powers
Bibliography of editions of 'The Echo Maker.'
Collected list of reviews.
''The Echo Maker'' Reviews
at

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...