The Echo Maker

I want to apologize, first, for this tardy write-up. The truth is, I’ve been struggling to think of anything very insightful to say about The Echo Maker. But, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I think I may have something at least vaguely interesting. It has to do with the omnipresence of the brain and brain science and how some of the material, including The Echo Maker, has proposed implicitly, thrown into doubt, reconfigured, or destabilized fundamental notions of who we are. Explaining how I got onto this line of thinking will require some anecdotes.

There’s an odd experience we have when we’re reading about a topic that is novel to us, as much of neuroscience is novel to me. It’s the same thing we experience when we learn a new word. We start to see it everywhere. Now that I know a bit more about Parkinson’s, now that I know a bit more about autism, now that I know a bit more about epilepsy, synaesthesia, Capgras syndrome, agnosia, etc., examples of atypical brain development and of brain damage appear in news stories constantly; they come up in my conversations with friends and relatives; books relating to them seem to materialize out of nowhere; the reading assignments in other academic courses bring them up; my own short stories begin to swirl around related themes. In the past two or three weeks, this has been uncannily true for me, and it’s gotten me to think in new ways about some of what we’ve read.

An acquaintance--Jeremy--who’s becoming a friend and whom I met through another acquaintance had, I noticed shortly after we’d been introduced, some habits in his conversation and in his Web correspondence (e-mail and instant messages) that could be construed as rude or, at the least, bizarre. For instance, in the middle of an IM conversation, he would disappear abruptly, while still ostensibly signed on, and come back forty minutes later, saying he’d gotten so involved in his music (he’s a composer) that he’d forgotten we were talking. This happened more than once. I also noticed, while I was with him in person, that, if I said anything ironic or sarcastic, he would pause and look blankly at the floor for a moment, then register the joke and laugh. He wasn’t big on prolonged eye contact either--which was fine by me, initially, since I think intense eye contact can easily become more creepy than polite. But his eye contact was so brief and so rare that I started to think something in this social situation was awry. I was beginning to take some offense, privately, to these various gestures, but didn’t say anything because I knew I was construing them as rude when, conceivably, no disrespect was intended. Then one time he mentioned in passing “having A.S.,” but didn’t elaborate, either assuming I knew what he was referring to, or testing whether I did, and the context gave me no clues, other than that it was a medical issue. The only “A.S.” I could think of on the spot was Ankylosing spondylitis, a rare form of arthritis--how I know of that A.S., I couldn’t say. Anyway, when I responded with something about Ankylosing spondylitis, he looked at me as though I had just broken into a foreign language that sounded funny to uninitiated ears. “No,” he said, “Asperger’s syndrome”--which I did in fact know some rudimentary information about. Suddenly, all the potentially offensive ambiguities in our interactions were explained. And of course I felt like a serious, serious idiot. A psychology student in neuropsychology class, I should have known. And Ankylosing spondylitis was a comically absurd guess. It struck me how much and how concretely our everyday interactions are shaped by the vicissitudes of the brain, and how a knowledge of the brain casts a different and brighter light on those interactions, bringing clarity as well as new questions when previously indistinct details are revealed, as in a picture moved to a different and better lit setting. And not just our everyday interactions but the big stuff too. We can see a similar phenomenon in The Echo Maker, where an alteration in a single brain has amazingly widespread effects, altering in turn whole sensibilities, whole relationships and families, whole lives.

Not long after the awkward and embarrassing incident above, it was announced on the news that the actress Natasha Richardson--daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, wife of Liam Neeson--had died because of a seemingly--but really only seemingly--minor head injury, which she sustained when she fell during a skiing lesson, after which she was talking and laughing and refused medical help. She died of apparently serious brain damage, which I won’t bother to explain here, two days later. That evening, when two American parents heard of her death and the circumstances surrounding it, they thought of their seven-year-old daughter, who had had a head injury, seemed to be fine at first, but had after two days, when they went to see her to bed, begun to complain of a headache--a pattern almost exactly like Richardson’s last days. Making the connection, the parents called their pediatrician, the girl was transported by helicopter to a hospital equipped to deal with the injury--which was the same as Richardson’s after all--and she survived basically unscathed. Then I heard on the news about a lawyer in the Midwest who was using the possibility that his client had Asperger syndrome as a defense in a murder case, claiming that his client was “laboring under it” so that he “didn’t know the nature of his actions or that they were wrong.” Wisely, the judge rejected this defense. Still, knowing what I know about Asperger’s, I found the lawyer’s attempt outrageous. When I mentioned the story to Jeremy, he explained much more precisely that such a defense wouldn’t make sense with this particular form of autism, but could make more sense--he said this with an air of caution--with other forms, although it would be a controversial argument even then. He spoke, moreover, about the dangers of conflating neurological and psychiatric phenomena and the misuse of neuroscience--this surely rings a bell with members of our class. The brain, with both its power and its vulnerability, shapes our lives in real ways, on the individual level, and our world, on a societal level.

These coincidences and parallels reached a peak this afternoon when I was having lunch with a friend, who’s a novelist and professor. He mentioned, apropos of something else, having been on the committee that voted to give the National Book Award to Richard Powers for The Echo Maker. My friend, however, was the only person not to vote in favor of Powers’s book, which he said he hated. He said, furthermore, that he sees psychology currently and increasingly replacing philosophy and making it irrelevant, and he sees neuroscience replacing psychology; and this made him nervous, deeply nervous. When you study literature, it is sometimes said, philosophy is always right around the corner; but more and more it is psychology and neuropsychology that are around the corner, as Richard Powers unquestionably knows. Given my friend’s age and education, I should think that The Echo Maker violates fundamental ideas he holds about what literature is and ought to be. My friend, when we were discussing another thing entirely, mentioned that he’d recently met Oliver Sacks at a lecture and that they’d been e-mailing since, planning eventually to get together. They’d been talking about what “apprehension” means, from the perspective of a writer and that of a neuropsychologist. My friend said, fittingly, “I think I may be afraid of Oliver Sacks.” The brain, brain damage, brain science--they are omnipresent and to some people a major threat, a threat to aesthetic, intellectual, moral, legal, and philosophical views. I will admit, I felt a twinge of anxiety when reading The Echo Maker, because it gets at such visceral and deeply embedded fears and destabilizes some of our smug sense of safety, constancy, comfort, and so on.