The Echo Maker begins with a horrible car crash in which Mark Schluter is trapped in his car on an icy road in Kearney, Nebraska. We don’t know what caused the crash. Mark is eventually rescued and in the hospital for quite some time with brain damage. It is not until Mark begins recovering that his doctor realizes he has Capgras syndrome: a belief that people (or a person) close to the injured person is an impostor. Mark believes that his sister Karin, who returned to their hometown of Kearney to care for Mark, is a shadow of his “real” sister.
We follow Mark as he recovers and how he learns to develop a suspicious relationship with the “impostor” Karin. We also see how Mark’s denial affects Karin: she feels betrayed and unloved. Yet, at some point, Karin becomes afraid that Mark will realize that she is truly his sister. Her fear arises because Mark idolizes his idea of his “real” sister and constantly talks about how supportive and loving she was. In fact, Karin knows that she was not like this, and is concerned that Mark will drop his idealized image of the “real” Karin once his syndrome is cured. ”She’d gotten used to the doubling, to being this woman. It let her start from scratch with him, even while the other Karin improved so drastically in his memory. A chance to rewrite the record: in fact, two chances at once.”
Another main character in the novel is Gerald Weber, a renowned neurologist, who hears of Mark’s case and comes to Nebraska to provide a consultation. Gerald is also a popular writer who uses case studies to explain different neurological phenomena. Although Gerald’s past books were bestsellers that were widely respected by other scientists, his latest book has been a critical failure. He travels to Nebraska feeling uncertain of himself and his career.
Mark spends much of the book trying to figure out how his crash occurred and who called the police to rescue him. The author, Richard Powers, starts building the suspense of the cause of the accident from the beginning, but you don’t notice his subtle machinations until you are near the end of the book, discovering how and who caused the accident. Powers was very effective in creating this suspense.
Throughout the novel the primary symbol is the crane. Kearney is a travel stop for thousands of cranes in their annual migration. Tourists travel from around the world to view the cranes. A sub-plot connected to the cranes is Karin’s reconnection with her old lover Daniel who is an environmentalist working at a wildlife refuge. Daniel is fighting the proposed development of the crane’s natural setting. Here is one excerpt comparing the cranes and humans:
For an instance, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors.
The Echo Maker was well-written and interesting. I truly was interested in Mark and Karin and how they dealt with the Capgras syndrome. The idea of identity and how a person identifies him or herself was interestingly explored. I wasn’t as excited about Gerald Weber’s character. The relationship and dialogue between he and his wife was annoying and uninteresting. I liked the novel but did not love it.
Rating: 
As a side note, I wanted to see if the cranes truly come to Kearney every year. They do! From the Kearney Chamber of Commerce web-site:
Almost 500,000 sandhill cranes, or 90 percent of the world’s population of the birds, migrate through the region, and people from all over the world come to view the spectacular animals.
At approximately 3 1/2 feet tall and with an almost-6-foot wing span, anyone who has seen the annual crane “convention” can tell you the cranes are a must-see.
Cranes, one of the oldest known bird species alive, have been stopping on the Platte River for thousands of years, since the last ice age formed the Platte, researchers believe. Sandhill cranes mate for life. The pair flies the same path every year from their nesting grounds in Canada, Alaska and Siberia to their wintering spots in Texas and New Mexico.
Now that my sister and brother-in-law are moving to Nebraska, I have a good chance of going to see the cranes.
