2 NOVELS BY RICHARD POWERS

The Echo Maker has been called a “post 911 novel”,a description that seems to fit in that its central metaphor is the yearning for a time before life became problematic. But that’s too pat a description, and it cheats against Power’s ongoing themes of characters trying to reintegrate themselves into what they view as an ideal past they’ve either been torn from, had ignored until they were older and hobbled with responsibility and ailments, or were denied outright. There are elements in common with Don DeLillo, as in how a constructed reality and the narratives we create to give them to give them weight, but DeLillo, despite his frequent beauty, hasn’t Powers’ heart. The Echo Maker makes me think of a comedy routine where the comedian posits “I went to bed last night and when I woke up everything around me had been replaced with exact replicas”.The comedy routine was funny, the novel is tragic, but they share the same premise, finding yourself stuck in a skin where nothing around appears false, a world of impostured objects. Family crisis time, of course, as neither Karin nor Mark having especially heroic lives to begin with, suddenly tossed by circumstance into a medical dilemma where the desired , dreamed of outcome would be a return to the banal life that existed before the accident. Powers shares with DeLillo the ability to wax lyric on the familiar world and make it appear strange, foreboding, erotic, fancying a semiological turn as the associations with the objects and places fade and the remains of memory become a forlorn poetry. But again, Powers has the younger, bigger heart than…