School of Distance Education

particularly in helping to build suspense. Changez’s 
tone, which is sometimes exaggeratedly polite, 
sometimes darkly menacing, is laced with the bitter 
irony.
Changez feels betrayed by America in the 
aftermath of 9/11. Manhattan, which had always seemed 
welcoming to him, and its crowds, in which he had 
always found a place and felt at ease, suddenly began to 
seem to accuse him. Suddenly, he became the target of 
racist slurs. As America prepared for military retaliation 
in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, he began to feel 
even more discomfited. Changez begins to further 
identify as a Pakistani. He decides to abandon his job in 
New York and returns to Pakistan. In Lahore, he 
becomes a university lecturer, an advocate for anti-
Americanism, and an inspiration for oft-violent political 
rallies. His exposition of US behavior in its grief-crazed, 
wounded state offers a sort of postscript to this novel. 
“As a society, you … retreated into myths of your own 
difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And 
you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world … 
Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not 
only of the rest of humanity but also in your own.” What 
The Reluctant Fundamentalist 
trying to convey is the 
deep rooted indoctrination of religion the stereotyping of 
Muslims in the West.

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
36 
The Echo Maker 
by Richard Powers 
Richard Powers is at once one of America's very 
best- and least-known novelists. With his formidable 
intellect, 
this 
honest-to-goodness 
polymath, 
sets 
blisteringly smart, highly literary novels not in politics
or journalism, but in the worlds of genetics, chemical 
manufacturing, pediatrics, virtual reality, artificial 
intelligence, even opera. Powers was born on June 18, 
1957 in Evanston, Illinois. At the University of Illinois , 
Powers studied physics, rhetoric, and literature as an 
undergraduate, and earned a master’s degree in English . 
Powers moved to Boston to work as a computer 
programmer, but soon quit to write his first novel. A 
venturesome reflection on photography, memory, and 
war, 
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
was 
published in 1985 and nominated for a National Book 
Critics Circle Award. In 1995, Powers experienced 
nearly unanimous critical acclaim with 
Galatea 2.2
, 
another National Book Critics Circle nominee. He 
pushed the boundaries of met fiction by calling his main 
character “Richard Powers,” a reclusive novelist who 
holes up in the Center for the Study of Advanced
Sciences in a Midwestern university called “U.,” where 
he falls under the cynical tutelage of a neuroscientist 
who insists he can teach a supercomputer to pass the 
master’s oral exam in literature. As a writer-in-residence 
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 
Powers taught creative-writing classes and wrote 
Gain
. 
The novel movingly details a Midwestern single mother 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
37 
dying of ovarian cancer as it chronicles the one-hundred 
and-seventy-year history of the fictitious Clare and
Chemical Company. What Powers does in 
The 
Time of Our Singing
, published in January 2003, is to 
delve into nothing less than America’s dark history of 
racism. He explores it through the twentieth-century 
experiences of the Strom family.
The Echo Maker
,written in 2006 revolves 
around the story of Mark Schluter, who has an accident 
with his truck on a winter night in Nebraska. He is 
nursed back to health by his older sister Karin but after 
Mark recovers from his coma and head injury, he 
believes his sister to be an impostor. While he sleeps, 
Karin finds a mysterious note left at his bedside which 
reads: "I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / 
GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back 
someone else." Karin contacts a neurologist called 
Gerald Weber for help and he diagnoses Mark with 
Capgras syndrome, a condition where emotional 
memory is cut off from factual memory. Usually found 
only in schizophrenics, Mark's case is an extremely rare 
example of Capgras caused by injury. Mark however 
tries to recover from this and seeks to learn what 
happened to him on the night of his accident.
The Echo Maker
is a quiet exploration of how we 
survive, day to day. Powers has chosen a brain disorder 
that 
doubles 
as 
handy 
metaphor 
for 
human 
miscommunication of all kinds, and then added one 
more element to the mix, in the form of Gerald Weber 
—

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
38 
“the natty neuroscientist,” “the Beau Brummell 
of brain research” — who comes to town to lend a hand, 
or at least gather material for his collection of 
psychological oddities. His scientific discourses point to 
how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, 
whether down and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled 
magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. 
And that’s where the setting — 2002, early 2003 — 
comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into 
focus — the engagement in Afghanistan, “that bleak, 
first anniversary” of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq 
— Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no 
facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national 
calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its 
forms.
What is unusual in 
The Echo Maker
, besides its 
intricate plot, is Powers’ interest in nonhuman nature, in 
the countless species of plants and animals that have no 
beliefs but that now depend on our care to keep them 
alive. The flocks of cranes, with their collective 
migrations, are like the sets of neurons in our heads;
Mark’s failure to recognize his sister as his is like 
our failure to recognize endangered cranes, and coral 
reefs, and polar bears, as connected to us. Near the end 
of 
The 
Echo Maker
, Karin decides that humanity “suffered from 
Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin … 
called and willed and parented and taught and navigated 
all just like our blood relations … Yet humans waved 
them off: 
impostors
.” If we can’t share their world, 
Powers implies, we may share their fate. Powers cleverly 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
39 
intertwines the themes of doubles, aliens, echoes, loops, 
and repetition to emphasize the almost wave-particle 
duality of quantum physics when it comes to identity as 
decoded by the heart versus the brain.
Set against the Platte river's massive spring 
migrations, one of the greatest spectacles in nature, 
The 
Echo Maker 
is a gripping mystery that explores the 
improvised human self and the even more precarious 
brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of 
creation.