"A wise and elegant post-9/11 novel . . . It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre . . . The Echo Maker is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day . . . The Echo Maker joins my Powers favorites through the admirable harmony he achieves between his rhetorical strategies—on the life of the sandhill cranes, on the furrowed dynamism of the brain—and the travails of Mark, Karin and Weber as they try to navigate their altered territories . . . Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down-and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that's where the setting—2002, early 2003—comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus—the engagement in Afghanistan, 'that bleak, first anniversary' of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq—Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review

"Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more  . . . Powers has established himself as one of our most praised as well as one of our most prolific writers of fiction. . . . Powers is not only adept at crafting large-scale narrative and symbolic structures; he is also a remarkably gifted aphorist, a lyrical nature writer and a sharp observer of human situations . . . It is telling that Powers is typically praised for his intellect . . . His capacity to elucidate scientific ideas and speculate about their larger meanings is indeed impressive . . . Powers's feeling for this material is exhilarating, his sense of wonder infectious . . . Powers's characters tend to be paragons, intellectual or ethical, but Mark, in particular, is convincingly imagined, with a fine ear for his verbal and mental rhythms . . . Powers's eye for social detail remains as sharp as ever . . .  The range and magnitude of Powers's talents are not in question . . .  Powers's descriptions . . . are sublime, as is his vision, woven into the novel's metaphorical texture, of the human species as but another evanescent episode in life's vast flow. The cycling of time, the interconnectedness of all living things, the mind-blowing—indeed, mind-creating—magnificence of nature, the obligation to live humbly and responsibly: All of Powers's great themes return here."—William Deresiewicz, The Nation
 
"A grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning . . . If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big."—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books

"Powers may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing . . . In The Echo Maker Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel's abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us."—Albert Mobilio, Los Angeles Book Review

 

“His philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the landscape of the Great Plains.”—The New Yorker