![]() Karin Schluter rushes back to her hometown to see her brother and discovers a strange handwritten note by his bedside: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.” Author unknown. An anonymous person calls in the accident, and Mark is transported to the hospital, where, after an initially optimistic prognosis, he falls into a coma. Late one winter night, Mark Schluter’s truck overturns on a lonesome stretch of highway outside Kearney, Neb. The catastrophe that kicks things off is a small one in the scheme of things, solitary. ” “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. Nor does the book open in the anxious days after the attack, with the characters wandering the white, deserted streets and wondering, “How can I ever go back to my superficial preoccupations over high-thread-count sheets / that new S.U.V. It does not unfold in the sunny spring and summer before the disaster, placing the shallow high jinks and aspirations of the characters in stark relief by our knowledge of the looming event, ending perhaps with a dissipated yuppie waking on that September morning and relishing what a nice blue day it is outside. To dispense with the longstanding book reviewing practice of first-paragraph throat clearing, may I offer up Richard Powers’s “Echo Maker” as a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel? It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre.
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