Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Well,” he said. “How is…your mate?”

Deep silence from California. “You’ve forgotten her name, haven’t you?”

“Not ‘forgotten.’ I’ve just mislaid it, for the moment. Ask me anything about her. Brookline, Massachusetts. Holy Cross, Stanford, dissertation on the French colonial adventure in sub-Saharan…”

“It’s called ‘blocking,’ Father. It happens when you’re anxious or uncomfortable. You’ve never really gotten used to it, have you?”

“Gotten used to what?” Stupid time-buying.

Jessica stopped clicking. She was enjoying this. “You know. Never gotten used to your daughter sleeping with someone from the humanities.”

“Some of my best friends are humanists.”

“Name one.”

“Your mother is a humanist.”

“My mother is the last of the pagan saints. How soul-strengthening you’ve been for her, all these years.”

“You know, Jess. It’s really starting to worry me. It’s not just common names anymore. I’m surprised by entries in my agenda, in my own handwriting.”

“Daddy, remember what you said in one of your own books. ‘If you forget where you put your car keys, don’t sweat. If you forget what car keys are , see a physician.’”

“Did I say that?”

Jess laughed, the same goofy, distracted, bucktoothed laugh she’d laughed at eight years old. It cut right through him. “Besides, if it gets really bad, you can get your hands on the latest and greatest drugs. You guys have all sorts of things you’re not telling us public about yet, don’t you? Memory, concentration, speed, intelligence: a pill for everything, I bet. Irks the crap out of me that you won’t cut your own flesh and blood into any of this stuff.”

“Treat me nice,” he said. “You never know.”

“Speaking of your book, Shawna showed me the Harper’s review.” Shawna. No wonder he could never remember. “I say to hell with him,” his daughter said. “Obviously jealous, pure and simple. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”

A flash of disconnect. Harper’s ? They’d jumped pub date. His publishers must have known about the review days ago. No one had mentioned anything to him. “I won’t,” he said.

“And have yourself a happy little birthday? Can you do that much for me?”

“I will.”

“Which I suppose means writing four thousand words and discovering a couple of heretofore unknown states of altered consciousness. I mean, in other people.”

He said goodbye, folded and pocketed the cricket, then hopped on the bike and pedaled up to Setauket Common and the Clark Library. He ran the gauntlet of news-magazine headlines: U.S. bombs obliterate Afghan wedding. Cabinet-level Security Department rushed through. Where had he been while this was happening? Handling the new Harper’s in its hardened red plastic folder, he felt vaguely criminal. Obscene, looking up a review of his work. Like Googling his own name. Scanning down the table of contents, he felt ridiculous. He’d been writing for years, with more success than he’d ever dared imagine. He wrote for the insight of the phrase, to locate, in some strange chain, its surprise truth. The way a reader received his stories said as much about the reader’s story as about the story itself. In fact, his books explored that very fact: there was no story itself . No final judgment. Anything this reviewer might say was just part of the distributed network, signals cascading through the fragile ecosystem. What could a pan or praise matter to him? He cared only what his daughter thought. His daughter’s mate. Shawna. Shawna. They’d read this piece, but not yet seen the book. If Jess got around to The Country of Surprise —and he imagined she would, someday — she’d be reading, inescapably, the book this review created, in her mind. Best to know what other volumes were now floating around, spun from the one he wrote.

The title of the review jumped off the page with a sickening thrill: “Neurologist in a Vat.” The reviewer’s name meant nothing to him. The article started out respectfully enough. But within a paragraph, it turned brittle. He began to scan, lingering on evaluative dismissals. The thesis, at the end of the second paragraph, was more damning than Jess had let on:

Driven by medical imaging and new molecular-level experimental technologies, brain research has surged ahead phenomenally in the last few years; Gerald Weber’s increasingly slender, anecdotal approach has not. He returns here with his familiar and slightly cartoonish tales, hiding behind an entirely predictable if irrefutable plea for tolerance of diverse mental conditions, even as his stories border on privacy violations and sideshow exploitation…Seeing such a respected figure capitalize on unacknowledged research and unfelt suffering borders on the embarrassing.

Weber read on, from out-of-context quotes to gross generalizations, from factual errors to ad hominem attacks. How could Jess have been so matter-of-fact about this? The piece made his book out to be both inaccurate science and irresponsible journalism, the pseudoempirical equivalent of reality television, profiting from fad and pain. He dealt in generalities with no particulars, facts with no understanding, cases with no individual feeling.

He did not read the review through to the end. He held the magazine open in front of him, a score to sight-sing. Around him in the bright, snug library sat four or five retirees and as many schoolchildren. None of them looked at him. The looks would start tomorrow, when he showed up on campus: the nonchalant gaze of colleagues, the pretense of business as usual, behind masked excitement.

He thought to research the reviewer, get a character sketch of the character assassin. Pointless. As Jess said: to hell with him. Any explanation Weber might construct for the attack would be just a story against this story. Jealousy, ideological conflict, personal advancement: explanations were endless. In the field of public reviewing, one scored zero for appreciating an already appreciated figure. With a target as large as Gerald Weber, one earned points only for a kill.

Even as he rehearsed these rationalizations, they sickened him. Nothing in the review was out of bounds. His book was fair game. Some other public writer found him exploitative: fair enough. He had often worried about that very possibility himself. Weber stared out the picture window, across the Common at the two Colonial churches, their harsh, believing beauty. Reading the worst left him almost relieved. No such thing as bad press, he heard Bob Cavanaugh whisper.

The book was what it was; no further evaluation would change its contents. A dozen people in shattered worlds, putting themselves back together — what was there in such a project that merited public attack? If he hadn’t authored the book, Harper’s wouldn’t have reviewed it at all. The review gave itself away: it didn’t aim to destroy the book. It aimed at him. Anyone who read the review would see this. And yet, if Weber had learned anything about the species, after a lifetime of study, it was that people flocked. Already, the core of the intelligentsia, wet forefingers in the air, were gauging the change in the prevailing winds. The science of consciousness now needed protection from Gerald Weber’s slender, anecdotal, exploitative approach. And oddly, as Weber slipped the plastic-bound issue back onto the shelf, he felt vindicated. Something in him had half-expected this moment, for as long as he’d been celebrated.

He strolled past the circulation desk, hung a left out the main doors, and followed the familiar stone path a hundred paces down the slope before freezing. He stood at the path’s end, the intersection of Bates, Main, and Dyke. He would telephone Cavanaugh, on the cell phone in his pocket, even at home, on Sunday, to ask how the man could think to hide this attack from Weber. He pulled out the shiny silver device. It looked like a remote detonator in a thriller film.