The Echo Maker: A Novel
By Richard Powers
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25)
Richard Powers is a novelist of ideas — cerebral, if you will. That label can serve as a mixed blessing. For some readers, the phrase novelist of ideas is a turn-on. For other readers, it is the opposite, making his novels sound too much like work and too little like pleasure.
Yes, Powers writes like a genius, a certified intellectual who might feel above the fray of popular opinion. Yes, he’s built most of his nine novels around grand ideas. Indeed, Powers has touched on almost every topic under the sun. His acclaimed Gold Bug Variations (1991) links computer science, genetic coding, music, and art history in the second half of the twentieth century. Plowing the Dark (2000) features parallel narratives about the construction of virtual reality in a Seattle computer-programming laboratory and an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. In Galatea 2.2 (2001), Powers creates an artificial intelligence protagonist named Helen while reinterpreting the Pygmalion myth.
Powers has either studied each of those topics assiduously or learned about them from firsthand experiences. But he weaves his knowledge into each novel’s narrative so seamlessly that he seems to wear his genius lightly — the knowledge appears to come through the brains of his characters. Despite his erudite themes, there is nothing inaccessible about Powers’s novels of ideas. He is a first-rate stylist whose characters are never caricatures in service to abstract theory. In fact, many of his characters are unforgettable, flesh-and-blood individuals as finely drawn as those of any contemporary novelist. Take Laura Rowen Bodey of 1998’s Gain, for example, a resident of the fictional town of Lacewood, Illinois. Home of the Clare Soap and Chemical corporation, Lacewood is on the verge of producing an ecological disaster, and Laura’s personal plight speaks to larger themes of environment, corporate greed, and human nature.
Now comes The Echo Maker, which once again demonstrates Powers’s zest for the intellectual life and skill as a novelist. He concocts an unusual case involving a phenomenon called Capgras syndrome. The syndrome actually exists; characteristically, Powers has researched its real-world implications thoroughly before using it in his fiction.
The Echo Maker explores the mysteries of human memory, brain chemistry, character, and identity. The story, set in the plains of Nebraska against the backdrop of a stunning spring bird migration, follows a New York cognitive neurologist named Gerald Weber whose understanding of the brain is so altered by one patient’s case that reality assumes new meanings. The novel is also a family saga as Mark Schluter, the 27-year-old ne’er-do-well who suffered brain damage when his truck mysteriously flipped over, becomes the object of care from his sister, Karin, who leaves behind her settled life a few hours to the east. The relationships between Mark and his sometimes lover, Karin and her sometimes lover, and Weber are told within the quandary of why the truck turned over.
For readers who enjoy mystery fiction, The Echo Maker contains plenty of suspense, derived mostly from the intellectual puzzles it presents. For readers who spend their precious time reading novels to better understand the human condition, Powers supplies plenty to ponder about. — Steve Weinberg
Johnny Cash: The Biography
By Michael Streissguth
(Da Capo Press, $26)
Walk the Line, last year’s highly successful Hollywood version of the Johnny Cash story, was entertaining viewing, but it made for poor history. The film — and the small cottage industry that’s sprung up around it — is indicative of a kind of revisionist cult that developed around Cash in the later years of his life and which has only gotten stronger since his death in 2003. Author Michael Streissguth — who previously penned the insightful volume Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, about the making of the singer’s legendary live album — attempts to strip away the layers of hagiography in a new book that ultimately serves as a demystification of the Cash legend.
Streissguth devotes considerable sections of his narrative to the Man in Black’s lost years — the period from the mid-’70s through early ’90s, when his sales were lagging and his once-considerable cachet had diminished. Dropped by a series of labels, we discover a Cash in crisis, continuing to battle drug addiction, struggling to find his artistic voice, and far too eager to be led by the whims of others. Cast off as a relic and forced to work the Branson theater circuit, he was rescued from cultural and commercial ignominy by young rock producer Rick Rubin, who recorded and released a series of Cash comeback LPs — although Streissguth is appropriately critical in his assessment of those efforts as well. The book also focuses on the sad final months of Cash’s life, following the death of his beloved second wife, June Carter Cash. A passage describing a frail, stricken Cash alone in his room muffling sobs of grief so that his children won’t hear is just one of many vivid and heart-rending moments.
Featuring frank, often painfully candid testimony from his family, longtime friends, and colleagues, the book presents a visceral view of a man who was fallible, one who battled demons and was beset by doubts until the very end of his life, rather than the untouchable, almost biblically powerful figure of popular image. Expertly researched and compellingly written, this is a serious and much-needed study worthy of Cash’s complex and often contradictory life and legacy. — Bob Bozorgmehr
The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
By Ron Rosenbaum
(Random House, $35)
To discuss “the Shakespeare wars” usually means to debate the identity of the great writer himself. Did a relatively uneducated man named William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, compose all the plays and poetry attributed to him nearly 400 years after his death? Or did somebody else, of a higher social standing, with more formal education, and a world traveler, write the classics using Shakespeare as a pen name? Ron Rosenbaum cares about the answer, but not enough to build his book around an identity debate.
Instead, Rosenbaum explores what precisely makes Shakespeare such a timeless writer of plays and poetry. What, in fact, does it mean to say that a work is Shakespearian? To put it more colloquially, what’s all the fuss about? Wrestling with the answers drives the narrative of Rosenbaum’s intellectual exploration. The result is a book unlike any of the millions of words already published about the Bard.
To call a book by Rosenbaum unique would seem like a tautology to readers familiar with his writing between hard covers, in magazines, and in newspapers. Rosenbaum combines shoe-leather journalism with intellectual prowess in remarkable ways. His 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, explores the exceptionalist question as it pertains to the murderous German dictator just as the new book explores the exceptionalist question with respect to Shakespeare. Anybody unfamiliar with Rosenbaum’s writing can start with The Secret Parts of Fortune, an enthralling 800-page anthology published in 2000. (The title is taken from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.)
Rosenbaum, a Yale University English major, explains at the beginning of Shakespeare Wars how his viewing in 1970 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, changed his life. Following that are 14 chapters about various interpretations of Shakespeare’s words — interpretations sometimes grounded in unresolved controversies, sometimes grounded in something that could pass for consensus. When it comes to witty and erudite writing, Rosenbaum is no Shakespeare. But he is certainly a worthy chronicler of Shakespearian debates. — S.W.