The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers

I love Richard Powers books. I need to read more. From Amazon:

A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalized. MacArthur fellow Powers (Gold Bug Variations, etc.) masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose—powerful, but not overbearing—brings a sorrowful energy to every page.

That doesn't even begin to cover it. Here are some more reviews, or just go read the book.

Migratory Spirits

To dispense with the longstanding book reviewing practice of first-paragraph throat clearing, may I offer up Richard Powers’s “Echo Maker” as a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel? It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre. It does not unfold in the sunny spring and summer before the disaster, placing the shallow high jinks and aspirations of the characters in stark relief by our knowledge of the looming event, ending perhaps with a dissipated yuppie waking on that September morning and relishing what a nice blue day it is outside. Nor does the book open in the anxious days after the attack, with the characters wandering the white, deserted streets and wondering, “How can I ever go back to my superficial preoccupations over high-thread-count sheets / that new S.U.V. / my [insert timely, vapid cultural signifier here].” “The Echo Maker” is 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.

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In the Heart of the Heartland
By Margaret Atwood

The Echo Maker is Richard Powers's ninth novel. His first, the acclaimed Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, came out in 1985. In the twenty-one years since then, Powers has been a volcano of activity, producing works as varied as Prisoner's Dilemma, Galatea 2.2, The Gold Bug Variations, Plowing the Dark, Gain, and The Time of Our Singing. He's been nominated three times for the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and has received both of the "Genius" prizes—a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award. As I am writing this, he has just been nominated for a National Book Award, for the very book I am now reviewing. That sort of thing puts a critic on notice, and indeed Powers has gathered critical comments that most writers would kill their grannies for. "Powers is a writer of blistering intellect," said the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "He only has to think of a subject and the paint curls off. He is a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in that respect he has few American peers." There's more in that vein, and more, and more. So if he's so good, why isn't he better known? Let me put it another way —why haven't his books won more medals? It's as if juries have recognized the prodigious talent, the impressive achievement, and have put him onto short lists, but then have drawn back, as if they've suddenly felt that they might be giving an award to somebody not quite human—to Mr. Spock of Star Trek, for instance. He's got a Vulcan mind-meld on the critics, all right, but could it be that he's just not cozy enough at the core—that he's too challenging, or daunting, or— dread word—too bleak? On the other hand, there are books you read once and there are other books you read more than once because they are so flavorful, and then there are yet other books that you have to read more than once. Powers is in the third category: the second time through is necessary to pick up all the hidden treasure-hunt clues you might have missed on your first gallop through the plot. You do gallop, because Powers can plot. Of some books you don't ask How will it all turn out? since that isn't the point. It's certainly part of the point with Powers. Only part, however.

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A Powers-ful Presence