The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Neurological sciences are flourishing and the results have been creeping into our literature. First there was its popularization by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Then there was a substantial chunk of it in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Ian McEwan puts you in the head of a fictional neurosurgeon in Saturday. And now Richard Powers really digs deep in his novel called The Echo Maker.

I hadn't recognized Richard Powers' name when I bought The Echo Maker based on its description in a listing of National Book Award finalists. When it arrived, I realized that I'd read a previous work of his entitled The Gold Bug Variations, a heavy-duty novel that attempts to connect the elements of DNA to music (I'm still very confused about this book, so don't ask.)

In The Echo Maker Powers depicts Capgras syndrome in a young man who suffers exteme head trauma in an automobile accident. Capgras is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a close family member or spouse, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor. Powers uses this condition to set up tension between the accident victim and his only living relative, a sister who arrives on the scene hoping to take care of him.

I fell in love with this book relishing it until about two-thirds of the way through. Then the author started getting a little too artsy for my taste with long unintelligible paragraphs pedanticly mixing science, philosophy, and intuition. Since Powers was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (those genius grants), I will kindly assume that he was simply writing over my head -- although the words "failure to communicate" come to mind.