Book review: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

I started a new blog, "Katie Likes to Read," where I'm going to post reviews of the books I read. My first one got a little too long!--and I didn't want it out there in the public blogosphere for someone to search for and then use for a class paper. (I know that happens a lot, and plagiarism is not cool.) So I'm going to put the full review here and a truncated version on my reading blog. Don't feel obligated to read this if you aren't a reader or aren't interested! :)

The Echo Maker is about Mark Schluter, who is in a coma-causing car accident; his sister, Karin, who travels to nurse him to health; and the brain expert, cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber. Upon waking from his coma, Mark believes the woman who looks and talks like his sister Karin is really a double, an impostor. Karin contacts Weber and asks him to help with Mark's case. Amid trying to help Mark recognize Karin, Karin and Weber also must deal with his increasing paranoia about his mysterious car accident--its causes and participants--all while experiencing their own struggles and shifting identities.

Told from the third person from several different perspectives, the story is sometimes narrated with Mark's point of view in mind, sometimes with Karen's, and sometimes with Weber's.

My impressions upon finishing this book:

Drawn-out and slow
Liberal (politically)
Clever

I guess you could say it wasn't my favorite. This was one of those books I thought about not finishing, but once I'm 300 pages into a book, I figure I might as well make it to the end. Perhaps I should have known: Powers begins,

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the
sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with
the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on
the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of
a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.
(1)

He goes on in this way for seven paragraphs--saying essentially the same thing four or five different ways. The entire novel seems this way, with very little action or movement in the plot line. Powers instead slowly examines what's going on in the minds of the characters, which is fine, but still often redundant.

It was also frustrating for me to read the random, pointless attacks on conservatism and the overt "birds are better than humans" tree-hugger message. Set a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the story contains several--if not dozens--of jabs at conservatism and the Bush administration: "By winter, America rose up striking at targets everywhere. Rupp's duty time increased, and a few guys he served with were dragged off to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the third of February, just after the president delivered his hunt-them-down State of the Union address and Washington lost track of bin Laden, Mark came to Rupp and said he'd changed his mind" (212). Powers paints America as a predator, rising up to "strike" at targets while soldiers are "dragged" to serve. Later, Powers writes, "[Weber] ran the gauntlet of news-magazine headlines: U.S. bombs obliterate Afghan wedding. Cabinet-level Security Department rushed through" (220-221).

In addition, the "green" theme was blatant: "Something in Daniel mourned more than the cranes. He needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and godlike, nature's one shot at knowing and preserving itself. Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the place" (57). To Powers, the earth has been ruined, and man is the culprit. And later:

In the first week of October, the family [of birds] roosts on the eastern prairies of Colorado. After daybreak, as they graze the fields ... the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season. (277)

These examples are just a sampling of something bigger--something in the overall tone of the novel that borders on anti-human.

One aspect of the novel I did enjoy was Powers' clever use of changing syntax, diction, and word choice as Mark's brain function and self-awareness return after the accident. When the third-person narrator narrates from Mark's point of view while Mark is in and out of a coma, the language is stilted, choppy, barely understandable: "Where his mouth was, just smooth skin. Solid swallows up that hole. House remodeled; windows papered over. Door no more a door. Muscles pull lips but no space to open.... A room of machines, the space he can't reach.... Someone says be patient, but to not him. Be patient, be a patient is what he must be" (19). After he comes out of the coma and is recovering in the hospital, the narration begins to make more sense but shows how Mark isn't fully well:

They ask him who's the vice president under the first bush. Insane. What next?
Senators in the trees? They tell him to count backward from a hundred by threes.
Is this a particularly useful skill, might one inquire? They give him tons of
quizzes--circling things, crossing them out, and whatnot. Even here, they jerk
him around, make the print way too small, or give him ten seconds to do half an
hour of work. (66)

Later, out of the hospital, Mark is back to a normal level of brain function, but his paranoia and confusion are evident:

But the details aren't worrying Mark right now. He's after the full jigsaw.
Which is exactly what everybody wants to keep him from seeing. Some kind of
systematic cover-up, to keep him from finding out too much about what he's
stumbled into. Look at the facts: A few minutes after he picks up this angel
hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere ... he has an accident. Then, in the
hospital, something happens to him on the operating table. Something that
conveniently erases his memory. And when he does come back to himself, they've
swapped out his sister, who might help him remember, and replaced her with a
fake who keeps him under 24/7 surveillance. That's a lot to call coincidence.
(282)

Although Power's use of interesting, dynamic language is clever, for me it did not redeem the book. Overall, it was still too slow and too annoyingly liberal. I don't think I'd be tempted to read anything by Powers again.

Book review: Seeing through new eyes

Last week, I finished reading Seeing through new eyes: Changing the lives of children with autim, Asperger syndrome and other developmental disabilities through vision therapy by Melvin Kaplan. Dr. Van Dyke at the Rimland Center tipped us off to this book and the work this author/doctor does. I had never heard of anything like it.

Kaplan uses prism lenses (special glasses) and vision therapy to alter how people see and perceive their world. He posits that many "undesired" behaviors we see in autism--toe-walking, hand-flapping, dragging hands along walls, stimming, staring at spinning objects (like Nate does)--are children's coping mechanisms, their "logical strategies for adapting to sensory disturbances" (p. 45). These children are "seeing" 20/20 but are not perceiving correctly. He writes that these behaviors are not the problem; they are the solution! They show us what is going wrong perceptually.

He writes that children's toe-walking, stimming with their hands, touching walls when they move "stem from their inability to handle both themselves and space simultaneously. To orient themselves, they flap their hands or touch objects, providing sensory input that tells them where they are in space" (p. 18). Many people with autism have problems with orientation of self (where am I?) and/or organization of space (where is it?).

The purpose of ambient prism lenses is "to actually alter perception in ways that cause patients to reoganize their visual processes[...]. The behavioral changes caused by this alteration of perception often are instantaneous and dramatic. Patients with autism or related disabilities have spent a lifetime developing strategies to compensate for their visual deficits. By the time they arrive at the optometrist's office, these strategies--eye turns, postural warps, self-stimulating behaviors, etc.--are habitual and ingrained. Ambient prism lenses instantly create a new visual world, in which those adaptive mechanisms are no longer either necessary or relevant. As a result, patients must rapidly re-awaken previously suppressed visual processes, in order to make sense of their altered surroundings" (p. 34). Kaplan believes that altering these patients' perception can level the playing field in a way, making it possible for other therapies to be even more effective.

Kaplan includes many interesting and relevant case studies in addition to descriptions of the tests he uses in his practice (including tests for non-verbal patients).

This book was a page turner for me, not only because I found the case studies so interesting, but also because I saw so many children I know reflected in the pages. I see many children at Nate's therapy center walking on their toes while dragging one hand along a wall while a therapist leads them by the other hand. Though I've read of other explanations of some of the behaviors (e.g., toe-walking is the body's response to painful GI tract problems), many of Kaplan's explanations really resonated with me.

I'm not sure if Nate is an excellent candidate for vision therapy, as he doesn't display some of the markers Kaplan mentions multiple times. Nate doesn't toe walk. He doesn't drag his hands along walls. He doesn't flap his hands regularly. However, here are the tidbits in the book I did highlight that describe Nate:

"[Individuals with autism] display a fetish for numbers and letters, as well as spinning objects [...]. Higher visual development, in contrast, involves smooth eye movements and visual search patterns. The autistic pattern is marked by static attention, which is unsustainable, where the latter involves dynamic attention and is sustainable. Dynamic attention requires a concentration of internal energy, and patients who cannot coordinate their eyes are unable to achieve this level of concentration" (p. 55).

"Sometimes children will be comfortable watching certain sections of a video, but cover their ears, scream, or turn their eyes away during other sections. Such behaviors provide valuable insights into the type and amount of visual and sensory input a patient is capable of handling" (p. 61).

There are other times when Nate seems to completely zone out/stare into space when a question is asked, and I've often interpreted it as sensory overload, which may include visual/perceptual components.

I plan on recommending this book to anyone who asks for my "long list" of autism treatment information.