Is there an echo in here?

I finished reading THE ECHO MAKER last night, so I can get back to tackling Pynchon's AGAINST THE DAY.  It has been strange to have been tangled up in these personalities, having Richard Powers at our book group, seeing Powers discuss Pynchon at an academic discussion, hearing Powers laugh with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" about "the unreliable narrator," the flurry of national publicity, the seeming shift in personality taken on by Powers in promoting this National Book Award winning book, reading a critic compare Powers to Melville, naming my cats Melville, recently reading Melville's THE CONFIDENCE MAN...  But I digress.

It would be almost a joke to call Powers a "genius" at this point, given that the premise of the book is precisely an explosion of the fixity of personality or identity at all.  We are no more than birds, following ancient genetic maps.

(I think Powers looks like Stephen King, a similar horsey gaze, a gawky burden of walking in an oversize frame.  Certainly, they must be evil twins.)

I'm not sure I liked the book entirely.  It lacks a kind of sentimentality and closure that pleases me, like ATONEMENT or MIDDLESEX or even Powers' previous book, THE TIME OF OUR SINGING.  That had a nice Rosebud-style wrap-up.  This one?  Not so much.  The mystery story concludes all right, but I wouldn't say it does so neatly. The details of the mystery, the things the characters were trying to discover -- the car crash, its mysterious causes, the disturbing anonymous note, the allure of the attending nurse -- are all red herrings, in a way.  Powers is after a bigger mystery than one man's strange psychological breakdown. He's probing the mystery of identity itself and concluding that, as Jimi Hendrix so aptly sang, "Awwww, there's ain't no life nowhere."  Including that of the doctor.  Including that of the author.  Including that of the reader.  I liked the conceit of referring to an organizing principle in the universe, aka God, as The Tour Director.

Now I see, even as I'm writing this, below my typing, is the the phase I plucked out of the book to be a signature line on my email.  I believe it is well chosen, encapsulating the book, a book that rather defies that effort of encapsulation.

I can't say I envy Powers and his abilities.  I do wonder how it feels to cart all those ideas around in one's head.  Given that I face distractions and demands of family and friends on a constant basis, it is no wonder that Powers took a year off without speaking while he was living in Long Island.  And it is no wonder that I rely upon the wee hours of the morning and the solitude of rural driving -- dreading to receive calls on my cell phone -- in the afternoon.  Greta Garbo had it right.

It's rather fun to read about the Silver Bullet bar (where I promise I have never been), Mary Ann's diner, or the clack of red plastic hardbound magazines at the library, all items Powers lifted conveniently from his Urbana environment.  I had to wonder if he was choosing the names for fun or facility or a free pass to the Silver Bullet.  I'm not sure where he lives, but I think it's within blocks of where I do.  I wonder if he's listed in the UI directory.  Maybe I'll copy him this post.

Then, too, I had to think of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO -- with the main character named Marian Crane, the stuffed birds surrounding Norman Bates, the isolated landscape, the loss of identity, the psychological "expert" giving the theories of the day which now sound so archaic as to be laughable.  Will THE ECHO MAKER's science also be creaky in another fifty years?

Or Michaelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER, in which the conscious swapping of identity is the movie's premise and the conclusion is so much the same -- a man lying on a bed, a man no one recognizes, he may be dead or alive, he himself cannot say...

It is a shame to say Powers is a genius, although I do think the book is something of an inspiration for writers, because it seems as if he takes no credit for his work.  He can't, or at least he knows he shouldn't.  The work just comes through him, through research, through work, as everything always does, thanks to the Tour Director.  Which is why I sit here, year after year, watching my fingers move on the keyboard, waiting, a bird brain going through the motions, always surprised at what comes out.
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Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory. -- Richard Powers, THE ECHO MAKER