The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a good book. The science basis is interesting. The details of places are accurate (I’ve spent a good deal of time in Old Field, where one of the characters lives, and it’s very true to life) which goes a long way toward getting you into the book.
What is identity? Does a person have one? Every character in this novel gets mistaken for a version of themselves created by some other person (or people) not accurately, but in order to satisfy some emotional, political or (in the centerpiece case all the others revolve around) neurological demand of their own that has little to do with the original. The world that we see is not the world; it’s the world our brain creates for us to see. It’s often full of convenient fictions. The people we see aren’t themselves; they’re people our brain creates for us to see, and, inasmuch as the central concern of the novel applies, they are not anything like the people they think they are.
This is the experience of the doppelganger: to come suddenly face to face with the person everybody else has decided you are, but you actually aren’t. Good luck, bro.
The world the mind presents is infiltrated with the mind’s own biases, priorities and desires. The passions warp the experience of the senses. If only there was a way to battle the passions. Some way to take off our minds of flesh and put on a different kind of mind. Then we might have access to truth. And not some cosmic truth; just the regular workaday truths about who the people around us really are.
The Echo Maker doesn’t try to show us a way forward. But it does a good job of defining–and putting us through the lived experience of–one of the most fundamental human problems available.
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