Part of the point of Mark’s delusion, and of Powers’ novel—of all Powers’ novels—is that all reality is virtual: The mind, like it or not, is its own world and can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of any flawed home. More importantly, the probing questions about the nature of consciousness, and the abstract meditations on the ecosystems of Cranes, their brains, human brains, and the boorish march of progress that Powers seems to think that human beings are so notorious for, just overwhelm the book. There is a certain sensitivity to his character, but at the same time, Powers presents him (all of this after the accident of course) as something of a shit-kicking, Natural Ice slurping, Nascar fan.

Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what really happened. 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. But, at the same time, the book gradually adjusts as it progresses so that, by the end, we are reading what we have come to expect from Powers. While he sleeps, Karin finds a mysterious note left at his bedside which reads: "I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.

Undone by his change in circumstances, Weber muses that a “single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering,” explaining, in part, the appeal of his brand of popular science books. A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology. But it's never really clear why he pauses, or why he keeps going -- it's just kinda the drawn-out, barely-coherent stories of some pretentious middle-aged white guy. She saw that my job had me knee-deep in numbers and thought maybe I’d appreciate more words in my life for ballast.

So closely based on Oliver Sacks you wonder if Powers needed permission, Weber has written several bestselling books of neurological case studies that question the whole concept of consciousness and perception. This unfortunate ailment creates a bridge between Mark's personal crisis and the mysterious aspects of mind, memory, and identity. They've got some stunning verbal beauty and some well-crafted moments, but not enough to prop up the flailing plot, opaque themes, and absurd characterization. When he lights upon something interesting, he'll stay awhile (often too long), pressing into the depths with occasionally gorgeous sentences. Weber may be a partial fictionalization of Oliver Sacks, 1933–2015, who was a neurologist, best-selling author, and professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine.Now, take a second to consider the passage listed above, and a few more to consider the basic question of "selfness" or subjectivity. It's a strange form of agnosia, and while the person still retains all of their previous memories, just as lucidly as anyone else, they do not recognize close relatives. Sometimes Weber’s musings on the byways of neuropsychology overelucidate ideas and themes explored with more concision and subtlety in other sections, but small potatoes, that. That is, in between standing in for Powers himself, when they sound as though the narrator has briefly entered the souls of his creation.

Not only did it seem unlikely he would be subjected to that kind of peer disdain, but his reaction to it and the unraveling of his marriage made no sense to me, and was a major flaw in the novel and one that held it back from being as meaningful or sweeping as it was meant to be. If Powers had been doing the full work of imagining this character, Weber wouldn't be based on Sacks but inspired by him.

But as luck would have it, his pilgrimage out West coincides with a disturbance in his professional life: the critics have turned on him. Mark has perfected a dingy existence, passing the time with video games, beer and general lunkhead-ery. 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. As an obvious corollary to that suspicion, I also suspect that consciousness as the substrate for subjectivity does not exist outside the realm of nervous system function or its nonbiological equivalent, if there is any.

The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. As a result, it took me quite a while to finish this book, and there are probably many things I missed (for example, I was oblivious to the whole The Wizard of Oz theme until I read it in the Wikipedia entry after finishing the book. This novel is about ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance during which neither the characters nor the writing lives up. Meanwhile, an anonymous note surfaces, suggesting that Mark's accident might not have been as random as it initially appeared.After a near-death experience on a wintery rural road in Nebraska, he now struggles with Capgras syndrome: post-traumatic affliction leading him to believe that his sister, Karin, is an imposter. The best parts of this book were those written from the perspective of a character with severe traumatic brain injury. E’ tempo che il romanzo faccia un salto di qualità acquisendo i dati che ci stanno arrivando dai laboratori di ricerca sui fenomeni della percezione, della coscienza e dell’autocoscienza, dell’emozione e dell’empatia.