The Echo Maker / Richard Powers

Published in 2006, The Echo Maker opens late one winter evening when Mark Schluter’s truck overturns on a lonely highway in the flatlands of Nebraska.  Pulled from the vehicle, he is rushed to a hospital where he remains in a coma for an extended period of time.  His sister Karen quits her job in a distant city and returns to their hometown to be by his side.  When Mark does wake from his coma, he discovers an anonymous note by his bedside that reads in part, “God lead me to you so you could live.”  While he cannot remember the details of the crash, there are skid marks at the accident sight indicating he was trying to avoid hitting something or someone.  And the police have no idea who called 911 to report the crash.  It has all the markings of a clever mystery story waiting to be solved.

To complicate matters, when Mark finally awakens, his head trauma has caused another problem; he is suffering from Capgras syndrome.  It is a condition that prevents a person from recalling intense emotional situations.  In this case, Mark believes his sister (and his dog, too) is an imposter, an actress hired to take her place.  This opening setup had me curiously hooked from the get go.  Throw in a neuroscientist who is a dead ringer for Oliver Sacks, an environmentalist battling to save the sandhill cranes that migrate through the area every spring, and there is plenty of material to chew on in this novel.

And yet with such a great premise, I never warmed to Powers’ prose or to the characters he so intricately created on the page.  There was something clinical and distant in his presentation.  The book won the National Book Award following its publication, leading me to believe that Powers is a writer who either wows a reader or leaves them cold.  Unfortunately, for this novel at least, I fall into the second camp.  By the time the author tied up the separate plot lines at the story’s end, I had already lost interest.

Near Miss

Last evening
I thought I heard the moon sigh.
But it seemed
a stoic rock when I looked up.
And yet from my
vantage point I understood why.
Night’s shadows
were about to be blotted out.
Hungry clouds
approaching threatened erasure.
Its intricate
brushstrokes painstakingly inked
on landscape
seemingly about to disintegrate.
I cannot
swear that my ears heard true.
All I know is
I witnessed its clever sidestep.
And afterwards,
saw the moon wink in starlight.

Mobituaries : Great Lives Worth Reliving / Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenburg.

One word comes to mind to describe Mo Rocca’s prose in this book;  it is enthusiastic.  It is clear he is passionate about the lives and other things he is writing about. It is an offshoot of his podcast in which he salutes people and subjects that did not receive proper respect the first time around.  In a work crammed with odd tidbits and facts, no matter what chapter one turns to, the time spent reading is sure to derive a good return on investment.

Profiled in the book are obscure politicians, activists, and celebrities who have faded from view following their careers.  But he also provides obituaries for Medieval Science, Homosexuality As A Mental Illness, Prussia, and the Station Wagon.  While he humorously addresses these quirky topics, Rocca treats all his subjects with respect, highlighting the positives rather than the negatives.  For the most part, he does not resort to cheap shots but rather strives to spotlight strengths over faults, in the context of the time period in which each subject existed.

If I were to compare him to a similar author, Bill Bryson comes to mind.  Both use humor to provide interesting tidbits about serious historical events.  Mobituaries is crammed with fascinating bits of trivia guaranteed to captivate.  In a time when people are looking for comforting diversions, it is book sure to offer an escape from current concerns.  While he might be a one trick pony, the first time around, most readers will be delightfully entertained.

Stacked Deck

Today’s doctors
have taken the place of psychics

Running tests
that speculate what lies ahead

For a price, they
promise to reveal our future fate

Left for us to
interpret, a destiny spelled out

Insurance offers
no assurance that when spread

into a fan after
carefully watching the shuffle,

the deck wasn’t
stacked against us all the while

The immortalists / Chloe Benjamin

In this novel’s opening chapter, the Golds’ four children have decided to visit a traveling psychic who is supposedly able to predict the day a person will die. This event informs the novel’s four parts, which describe what life held in store for the Gold siblings.

Simon, the youngest, aware that he is gay, escapes to San Francisco shortly before the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.  Klara, a gifted magician, earns a chance to become a star in Las Vegas.  Daniel, the older brother, settles into the safety of being an army doctor judging whether young recruits are fit enough to be allowed to serve in the conflict in the MIddle East.  The oldest of the four, Varya, is the only one given a prediction of a full life. She becomes a scientist involved in longevity research.  In the sections that address each of their lives, Chloe Benjamin explores whether it is destiny or choice that dictates how they deal with life’s unfolding events.

While the author does an admirable job of describing the Gold siblings’ future lives, it seemed a stretch for me to believe that a visit to a psychic would have such an impact on all four of their lives.  Benjamin is an author who lives in my home city, and despite my willingness to be won over, the premise of this novel nearly never felt credible to me. Turning the last page, I found myself disappointed that her novel hinged its outcome on an event that never rang true to begin with.

Short Wave Radio

Nightly, as a teenager,
I would listen to Father’s short wave radio,
plumbing the dark’s thin air
in search of a language I didn’t recognize.

An atmospheric gift when
it suddenly materialized in our rec room.

In today’s shrunken world
all such elsewhere is just one click away,
and how mundane it seems
once translated as the weather forecast.

Back in the day, I cast
kites skyward and used their strings to
unscramble a fickle wind
to get a sense of wonders unimaginable.

Now, fully translatable,
I’m disappointed by voices understood.

Chances Are… / Richard Russo

When Chances Are… opens, it is September 2015 and three former college buddies are meeting at a house on Martha’s Vineyard owned by one of the men.  Now sixty-six years old, this is the first time they’ve all been together since meeting in this very spot in 1971, shortly following their graduation.  At that time, however, there was a fourth person who joined them, another college friend, Jacy Calloway.  Since she was engaged to another man, their relationships with her were platonic, even though all three of them had serious crushes on her.

After their 1971 Memorial Day weekend together, the four separate and get on with their lives.  Lincoln Moser returns home to Arizona, marries, and becomes a successful real estate agent in Las Vegas.  Teddy Novak eventually becomes an editor who runs a small religious press.  Only the third man, Mickey Girardi, seems to be the same wild spirit he was back in his college days.  He still rides a Harley and has spent his life being a musician in a number of rock and roll bands.  But what happened to Jacy after that gathering has remained a mystery all these years later.  After leaving the island in 1971, she disappears, never to be seen by her fiancé or family again.

Russo rotates the story’s perspective between the men and focuses on three different time frames.  The third, recalled in detail, is the year 1969 and primarily one specific event, the draft lottery all three men are facing.  The reader knows in the opening pages that none of the three were killed in the Vietnam War or even involved in the conflict.  Nonetheless, it remains a key to all that follows.  The draft drawing’s outcome has everything to do with what happens to Jacy when she leaves the island following their 1971 gathering.

Having grown up during the same time period as the story’s characters and having also gone through the draft lottery in 1970, I found much to identify with in this novel.  While the mystery of Jacy’s disappearance is eventually explained, of all the characters, she is never fully brought alive on the page by Russo.  Nonetheless, the three men are a delight to get to know.  Chances Are… does a wonderful job of elucidating how chance friendships and events in young adulthood often determine life’s direction. 

Physicians

In the darkest moods
of winter, sparrows are physicians
sent to dispel doubt

The medicine they
dispense is merely the healing touch
of their persistence

How can something
so small possibly slay a Goliath,
skeptical minds ask

But, when they burst
from nests despite dawn’s frigid
grip, eyes answer, see

Even if a placebo,
hope responds to the prescription
set by their example

A Proper Distance

In April’s boom,
visiting grandchildren next door
are blowing kisses
and sounding like cheerleaders
to be properly heard
through double-paned windows.
A distant dog adds
counterpoint, while wind-driven,
someone’s chimes
diligently contribute percussion.
Across the street,
boredom has motivated a man
to pick up a hammer
for the first time since moving in.
Home-confined, I’m
unable to escape the hubbub.
Today, the only thing
that maintains a proper distance
is silence itself.

The Power / Naomi Alderman

In The Power, Naomi Alderman creates a world in which young women suddenly possess a unique power, the ability to deliver a bolt of electric energy to overpower any opponent.  At first, it is used to rectify injustices inflicted on women across numerous cultures.  But in no time, it leads to revolutions across the globe, where women begin to abuse their positions of power to victimize men in society.  It also results in a counter revolution, in which men begin to fight back against what they view as sexual discrimination.  In other words, this book tries to address the question, “Is the cure worse than the disease” when roles in the power dynamic are switched?”

The Power is clearly a dystopian novel, a piece of speculative fiction that gratifies because of its willingness to show both sides, whether they be positive or negative.  In the novel, Alderman focuses on six characters: Allie (Mother Eve), a religious figure leading the women’s awakening; Roxy, a daughter tied to a crime family in England; Tunde, a journalist attempting to document the dramatic shift of power on a world scale; and Margot, an American politician with ambitions set on the White House.

The Power is a novel that grandly tries to address the topic of sex and power globally.  It does so without taking sides, leaving the reader to decide if the young women’s discovery of a dominating power is a good thing or not.  While Alderman’s plot sometimes strains belief, it never does cross a line into incredibility.  For readers who enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this novel will find a welcome place next to it on the bookshelf.  Outlining a possible sexual war in our near future, it does not feel all that far fetched in this era of #MeToo and the payment demanded.