Fuck the Academy
Cormac got robbed. Just finished Richard Powers' National Book Award winning novel, The Echo Maker, and it was very much a Richard Powers novel- lotsa ideas, plenty of character exploration and zero plot. We have several characters swirling around a mysterious premise, but we have little narrative movement. When Mark Schluter rolls his truck and suffers brain damage, Powers takes off: what does it mean when our understanding of brain chemistry exceeds our own brain's capacities to best serve our knowledge? What if we discover that consciousness can be reduced to biology? What if we can scientifically show through brain research that, in the pithy words of religious types who like to battle such reduction, "Sorry, but your soul just died"?

It's the book's question, and Powers delves deep, digging into all the memory and identity issues like the good excavator that he is. Sadly, I cared little about the characters, and a few catalyzed my short-twitch violence muscles as if I were trying to buy sausage in North Berkeley. Cutsey dialogue is an ongoing curse with this brainiac, especially when smart people are trying to be whimsical. Otherwise, Powers is as he always is- fascinatingly intelligent, psychologically penetrating and poetically illuminating- he just can't plot. To award this above The Road in the fiction category is to reward philosophy above story. I was intrigued and annoyed and provoked by it, as I am by most Powers books, but it has none of the narrative power of McCarthy's miracle. The more I read novels, the more convinced I am that Dostoyevsky and Faulkner were freaks. What those two managed with language, character development, ideas and, say it loud and strong, STORY, is extraordinary given the failure of just about everybody since to approach their best. Light in August or The Idiot or, for a wild card, Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It, the greatest debut of the last twenty-five years, are filled with wonderfully engaging big ideas, but they also grip you with rich and luscious stories.

This ain't no Powers bash, because it is a fine book, but as a novel, the lack of narrative drive gnaws. If you're interested in the revolutionary discoveries of neurochemistry and the potentialities that maybe there ain't no self there, no fixed identity, no soul or spirit, just a multitude of synaptic explosions with no grey matter captain, battling anarchically for control of a mythical will, then Powers is a helpful guide. But don't expect a lot of things to actually happen. Most of the novel takes place inside folks' troubled minds. Tuna would call it navel-gazing. I'll just call it normal life with a heavy dose of psychopharmacology, neurochemical philosophy, and cranes. Enter forewarned.