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.
School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
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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
School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
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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
—
School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
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“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
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.
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