Richard Powers Related coverage Book review: 'The Echo Maker' by Richard Powers

NEW YORK -- Five minutes after arriving at the Marriott Marquis Hotel for the National Book Award ceremony last month, Richard Powers remembered he had forgot his finalist medal.

"I really should go back and get this," said the tall, 49-year-old novelist, before bolting back to his hotel room.

As it turned out, Powers' hunch was right, as "The Echo Maker," his ninth novel, triumphed over his four competitors to be named best fiction of the year.

Before the ceremony, Powers discussed the novel, its origins and what he hopes it says about our ability to think and feel:

Q: What started you on "The Echo Maker?"

A: A couple of things. Many years ago my two nephews were in a horrible car accident and the person who found them left a note much like the note that propels the plot in this book, and that's always haunted me -- that note.

Also, some years after that, I was driving across country to see my mother in Tucson, Ariz. It was getting on toward sunset, I was in the middle of Nebraska. And I looked out off the interstate and I saw this large 3-foot high biped (a sandhill crane), then another. Then as far as I could see it was this continuous carpet of birds.

That image was in the back of my mind when I began reading neuroscience -- that sense of these creatures that dance and sing and gather together in this big city of birds and how they seemed vaguely familiar but really, really alien -- simultaneously something like humans, but really, really far away from humans.

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Q: Does what we know about the brain make it harder to operate as a novelist now?

A: In this novel, I wanted to tell a story that quite clearly showed that you cannot make a separation between knowing the world intellectually and knowing the world emotionally. That all the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

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Q: Why did you choose writing as a career?

A: Because I didn't have to choose. Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously. If not in fact, at least in imagination. So over the course of the years, the books have been explorations, through characters, of these different ways of knowing the world, history and biology, digital computer technology.

All of these are my opportunity to spend three or four years vicariously pursuing the road not taken. The career one part of me would have tried.