 Hardcover edition | |
| Author | E. L. Doctorow |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | January 14, 2014 |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 224 pages |
| ISBN | 978-1400068814 |
Andrew's Brain is a novel written by E. L. Doctorow, published in 2014. It was Doctorow's last novel to appear before his death in 2015.
Andrew, from a variety of mostly unknown locations, tells the story of his life and the events that have led him to where he has ended up through musings, ramblings, and occasionally fragmented tales. With seemingly no one else in his life, Andrew speaks to a person, presumably a psychiatrist only referred to as "Doc", who often prompts Andrew further into his disjointed narrative. Between tragedies of love, thoughts about what consciousness is, and a series of bad luck incidents, Andrew's story explores the questions of how much control individuals have over their own lives and how much of life is coincidence or fate.
Cunning [and] sly ... This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he's both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He's a fool, but he's no innocent.
The whole story comes to us as the rambling testimony of a depressed scientist being patiently interviewed, possibly by a government psychiatrist. Andrew flits around the events that led him here — wherever here is: Early in the book he says, "I don't know what I'm doing here," which makes two of us. He sometimes speaks of himself in the third person; he regularly mocks his unnamed interrogator; and he pays no attention to chronology. It's our job to put the tragic incidents of his life in order, to unscramble the taunting clues, to unearth the profundities buried in this misanthropic rumination. "Andrew's Brain" hurt mine. The problem isn't that the novel requires a significant degree of intellectual effort; it's that it doesn't provide sufficient reward for that effort.
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