As in her first novel, In the Woods, Tana French has created another sensuous, lyrical, haunting, suspenseful story. Although it is considered a mystery, it is much much more than that. It is a story of identity in all its literal and metaphorical forms. It is a social commentary (but never sententious) and it is also about fear and flight and love.

Casie Maddox and Sam O'Neill are detectives from In the Woods. Although Operation Vestal (from In the Woods) is mentioned several times, these books can be read in any sequence without ruining it for the reader. The setting is again Dublin, Ireland.

Cassie is the star attraction of this story as she goes undercover to live with four liberal arts doctoral candidates whose housemate, Lexie Maddox, is found dead from a stabbing in an abandoned cottage. Lexie Maddox looks exactly like Cassie, and the name is her last undercover alias, which adds to the mystery. The housemates will be told that she survived the stabbing.

It isn't necessary to give too many plot details. What is more important is the response from reading. This is a generous, gorgeous, thoughtful, poetic story. The tone is almost elegiac at times, especially during her descriptive paragraphs, and the author's use of the extended metaphor is prolific and often profound. At the end of the novel, I looked up hawthorn (the tree, flower, bush) on Wikipedia and had a chill run up and down my spine. Her descriptions, turns of phrase, elegant passages and graceful unfolding keep me fastened and fascinated. What I love about Tana French is that her novels are both character-driven AND plot-driven. She does not sacrifice one for the other. With most mysteries, I only read them once. But The Likeness can be read again just for the aesthetics. Also, there is no deus ex machina here. The story is excellently paced with a well-timed delivery of its climax.

Tana French is no lightweight, but she makes the story accessible to anyone who enjoys reading. She has that gift to appeal to a variety of readers-- even readers who look for largely escape mysteries. But this is not escape reading; it is the kind of reading that makes you ponder. It is philosophical and it echoes. It has shadows, swirls, hollows, heart,humanity, tension, suspense, whispers, hawthorn, hawthorn, hawthorn...

This is my fourth Richard Powers book in as many weeks. When the Austin paper reviewed The Echo Maker prior to its release, I was intrigued and drawn to this author with an immediate urgency to read him. First I read the beautiful and opera-like The Time of our Singing and followed with the tender Galatea 2.2, two very different stories that demonstrate Powers' narrative alacrity. Now add to that The Gold Bug Variations, a monumental love story combining genetics and music, and then The Echo Maker.

Read the first few pages of the book. If you are not hooked, then this is not your type of literature. I was so swept up by his magnificently poetic description of the sandhill crane migration on the Platte River in Nebraska that I was compelled to study more about these birds on my own. The cranes are both a reflection of the story's concern of species preservation and are also allegorical, metaphorical. Powers' generous mind and renaissance intelligence weaves the story of the crane migration into issues of neuroscience and neuro-cognition as it soars into the mystery thriller plot of the story.

This is a Pulitzer-worthy novel, perhaps too intelligent for what passes as Pulitzer these days. It is easily one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read, along with his books The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and The Time of our Singing. Add to that Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace; Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy; One Hundred years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez; The Counterlife, by Philip Roth; White Teeth, by Zadie Smith; Ada, or Ador, by Vladimir Nabokov; The Severed Head (or anything by this author), by Iris Murdoch; and Harlot's Ghost, by Norman Mailer.

I am so driven to tell others to read this beautiful story that although I cannot give the description it deserves, I must persuade readers to purchase it. It is a combination of naturalist concerns (the preservation of the cranes and the physical descriptions), neuro-science, dysfunctional family (with utter compassion and insight) and suspense thriller. Although there is an ethereal glow that swirls in every page, there is a definite, concrete and suspenseful plot. Powers has been compared to DeLillo; I agree only superficially. Both are linguistically erudite and have dense meaning packed between words and thoughts, but DeLillo is more elliptical and ambiguous, while Powers has concrete fasteners to keep the plot driven. Additionally, he has more heart, the heart of Marcel Proust. It would be difficult to make a film of any of DeLillo's books I've read, but Powers has an immediacy, a muscular story that would transfer well to cinema (where of course they could ruin it if they made it too linear).

The Editorial reviews reveal enough of the outline of the story; my intention is to tell readers just how profound is the experience of reading this novel. I was literally and literarily transported while reading and was engaged deeply by the third sentence. I am an RN that works in a neuro-psychiatric treatment center on an adolescent ward, so I usually avoid the subject matter in novels and look for different experiences; however, this story transcends the subject matter. Powers takes an aerial view of the life of an individual, the loneliness and solitude, while the characters strive to bridge the gap and explore the gap of connectedness. There is not one false note or sliver of self-consciousness in this exquisitely constructed story. Pathos without any treacly sentiment, startling science written poetically, and ancient rhythms humming all over. Powers has an amazing grasp of the utter incomprehensibility of time, and as in his previous novels, time is a major theme. I could read this story for the passages about time(and the cranes and the imagery) alone. However, there is a solid suspense mystery thriller, also, that keeps you on the edge even while you fall in love with the writing itself and go back and read passages just for its beauty.

Mark Schluter suffers a closed-head injury after his truck veers off the road. He is then the first diagnosed case of Capgras syndrome sustained from injury rather than psychiatric etiology. Powers uses Capgras syndrome (the neurological disorder causing inability to recognize those closest to him while perceiving others accurately) to explore philosophical issues of memory, human fragility, and the vague recognition of the human brain. He delves into consciousness, reciprocity, the two-way valve between the head and the heart of the self, and the division between the human and the natural world. Powers' theme is dualism--familiar vs defamiliarization, and how that echoes in our perceptions of self and our relationship with our family and our environment, both personal and ecological.

Mark feels exiled from his sister Karin, whom he no longer recognizes, and Karin in turn feels exiled from her brother, shattered at the way this disease symbolizes her separateness from her own self and the world around her.

Powers' explorations of neurology and ecology render a chilly warmth to the story. His heart pumps clearly throughout the pages, and he bridges the (DeLillo) authorial distance by making accessible the burning concerns of everyman. The coldness of Nebraska and his virtuosity in geological and geographical descriptions is heated by the eerie passion of the story, the tenderness of the characters and the haunting allegorical presence of the cranes.

This book has circulated through my dreams on several occasions; The Echo Maker certainly lives up to its title. Also, the characters are well drawn and sympathetic, and you care deeply about what happens to them. Interestingly, although the author's main protagonist in Galatea 2.2 was named Richard Powers, I felt him undulating enigmatically in this novel even more so than the former.

There is something so powerful and reverberating and epic about The Echo Maker that you want to embrace the author, who you feel breathing and bleeding and searing through the most spiritual parts of your being. It is utterly and unassailably elegant, peerless, sublime, soulful, exalting, eternal, and yet grounded and accessible, palpable and wet.

The writing is intelligent, the pace like a good, healthy jog. I have two minds about this book. Was it deep tasty chocolate, or plastic fruit? I could not put it down--it IS somewhat like good TV and is obviously written with cinema in mind. I also did care about the characters very much because Patchett has a knack for writing about people's psychological bearing and emotional state. And there are lovely descriptions with imagery that made me float through the story with ease.


The plot line has already been laid out well enough in the editorial reviews. Although highly coincidental, I would not have minded that at all--that can make for good storytelling--which it does. But there is another aspect to her writing--the pandering. It peals loudly. The 11-yr old girl, Kenya, has thoughts and actions like a 30-yr old. Even if she were a veritable genius, the sophistication of psychological insight would not be possible. I frequently groaned when Kenya was around.

I felt that the characters were essentially tools for Patchett's larger purpose--to tell this story and to weave some nice imagery along the way. But, I felt that when she was depicting the African American characters, she made them either cardboard or fatuously heroic (the tiny flaws only adding to their heroism)and was concerned about being politically correct. Her white characters suffered from the same whimpy characterizations, except for the old priest Sullivan. However, I felt he was also a tool, a vehicle for the story.

Despite these ghastly flaws, I still loved the story. The pace, the snow imagery, and the fact that even with all this confection there was a beautiful story involved--I ran right through it in two sittings. Guilty as charged.

I appreciated and enjoyed Berlinski's novel that infuses scholarly information on anthropology with a suspense story set in rural Thailand. It is written in a memoir form (although it is fiction). I did wonder why he used his real name rather than changing it. This distracted me at times--it made it difficult for me to separate the author from the narrator, which is important in any book that is not a memoir or autobiography. I do think it would have been helpful if he had changed his name. I think some problems stemmed from this. At times, the story seemed to digress into the self-consciousness of the narrator which brought me out of the story and into the author's consciousness.

The story is suspenseful and full of intelligent insights into human character. He takes us back to the beginnings of serious fieldwork in anthropology and shares the common threads of angst that exists between anthropologists--whether to immerse yourself into the lives of the people you are studying or whether to stay on the outside looking in. The main protagonist's (narrator) anti-heroine, the anthropologist who murdered a Catholic missionary, did immerse herself completely into the Thai culture of which she was studying and suffered (possibly) from a complete personality alteration.

I was enthralled with the author's description of the dyal, the rice ceremony indigenous to this rural culture. I do wish he had introduced it a lot earlier in order for the reader to ride its thematic importance. Instead, the author digressed quite a bit in the novel and then introduced the dyal ceremony and culture late enough for me to wonder if it was an artificial plot invention. I came to the conclusion that it seemed that way because of the first time novelist's editing problems (could have used a more aggressive editor). The dyal was central to the story but unfortunately appeared to be tacked on due to its awkward placement.

The main problem for me in reading the story was its structure/execution. It was a bit uneven, with a huge chunk afforded to the whole Walker family tree and their eccentric personalities. In the end, this had little meaning to the overall poignancy of the mystery. I do enjoy detailed descriptions of characters, but in this case it felt a little engineered as a red herring--or, perhaps the author wasn't quite sure how to balance the two cultures. It is also as if the author had not fully committed to writing either a book on social anthropology or a novel so decided to merge the two (without actually having a writer's firm control over it).

If this all sounds very negative, it is that I am slightly annoyed by these little inconsistencies that occasionally blocked my enjoyment of the story, i.e. the author writes with compassion and flare and really engaged me in this mystery, but often he got in the way of himself. By not separating Berlinski the author from Berlinski the narrator from Berlinski the protagonist, he was a distracting presence.

In spite of these problems, I was able to look past the unevenness of structure because I was so engaged in the character of Martiya. The author made her come alive for me, and I felt deeply concerned with her travails. She popped out of the pages and was so powerful a presence that I was able to overcome the stiltedness of Berlinski vs Berlsinski vs Berlinski. Her story moved me; she became legendary. Many days after I closed the pages of the book, she entered my thoughts. Martiya was original, striking, and haunting. I could almost smell her. The other characters in the story were well drawn, also, but not nearly as captivating as Martiya. Her presence and vividness is what raises a two or three star rating to a four star rating. Berlinski is forgiven his first time author flaws because he created a first rate character in Martiya.

I do recommend this book--it is rich with humanity. Martiya is a character worth knowing, the descriptions of anthropological research and its roots are meaningful, and the outcome is provocative.