RICHARD POWERS HAS written nine novels, and received a clutch of literary prizes and nominations. The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award in the US.

In short, he is a considerable figure — a polymath who studied science and literature, a musician and a voracious reader in a multitude of disciplines. As one might expect, such a range of intellectual curiosity translates into a grand fictional vision. Not for Powers the piece of ivory, two inches wide. His novels address large themes of human destiny and the pattern does not vary with The Echo Maker, which is concerned with questions of identity, personal, national and global.

Mark Schluter is an unremarkable, mildly unpleasant 27-year-old who works at a meat-packing plant and lives in a modular home — the clone of an infinity of identical little square boxes. He has a border collie, Blackie, a couple of old school mates, Rupp and Cain, with whom he shares an enthusiasm for recreational drugs, customising trucks, and violent computer games, and a girlfriend, Bonnie, with a voice like a cartoon mouse and a job impersonating a 19th-century pioneer at a tourist attraction.

Mark’s only surviving relative is his sister, Karin. She was his ally during a difficult, small-town childhood from which adulthood provided an escape route for her, but not him. Now Karin must bear alone the full weight of the catastrophe that precipitates Mark to that least desirable of all fame: medical celebrity.

One cold February night in 2002 Mark rolls his lavishly customised truck off a straight Nebraska road and is rescued, near-dead from hypothermia and head injuries.

The accident plucks Karin from the modestly successful life she has constructed by a succession of small advances — from receptionist to consumer relations executive for a computer company, with a nice flat and the beginnings of a relationship with “a friendly mammal in tech support” — and returns her to the deadening ugliness of her home town, Kearney, by the River Platte.

The lone phenomenon by which Kearney’s gross banality is redeemed is the spectacular annual migration of cranes which congregate at winter’s end, pausing in their journey from Mexico and Texas towards Alaska and beyond.

Karin, as she passes them, is unmoved by the dancing of the birds. Her focus is on her brother’s broken body and, as his wounds slowly heal, his broken mind. For Mark returns from the brink of the grave no longer himself. Or rather, his world is no longer itself.

He has developed Capgras syndrome, a rare condition in which the sufferer is convinced that everything around him, all the familiar attachments by which our sense of self is anchored, has been replaced by an identical replica. So Mark is convinced that his sister is not his sister, his dog not his dog, his house not his house.

Karin, who has sacrificed her own hard-won identity to succour a brother who repudiates her as an imposter, turns to Gerald Weber, a neurologist and author with an Oliver Sacksian interest in outlandish brain disorders. Weber, his own sense of self shaken by a critical backlash against his anecdotal narrative style and methodology, finds at Mark’s bedside the instruments of a dissolution of personality by means of which he will become unrecognisable to himself and those he loves best.

These crises unfold against an ecological drama. The river flats where the cranes congregate, a draw for bird-fancying tourists, are threatened by a vast development that would Disneyfy them to the point of extinction. Behind this rumbles the ominous bass of even larger questions of identity.

“To find the soul it is necessary to lose it,” runs the novel’s epigraph, a quotation from the Russian neuropsychologist, Luria. Its counterpoint of themes is so densely wrought that it can appear cacophonous; the text almost more resonant with ideas than its narrative framework can bear; the characters too fragile, in their inarticulate ordinariness, for the apocalyptic messages they have to convey.

Powers is not a graceful stylist. He writes like a man attacking a block of granite with a sledgehammer — with energy and furious purpose, the object of which is only intermittently evident to onlookers. From different angles, The Echo Maker appears in different guises — as a psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in the emotions, a commentary on America’s relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology. It descends directly from the great 19th-century novels of human actions and their consequences — Melville is the obvious comparison, although Zola’s fascination with “the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world” also comes to mind.

Like those great, unwieldy monuments of 19th-century fiction, Powers’s novels require several readings to uncover all their nuances. Such high seriousness may be inimical to the mayfly attention span of the MTV generation, but it is undoubtedly magnificent.

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