You Might Need To Be A Scientist To Understand 'Andrew's Brain'
In the tradition of Portnoy's Complaint, Catcher in the Rye, and Lolita, Andrew's Brain takes the form of a confessional monologue. The listener in this case, called "Doc," may or may not be a psychiatrist. Andrew's life story, as he tells it, is one calamity after another, from clumsy pratfalls to more serious damage for which he feels responsible. He's hapless, highly educated, cerebral and mostly sympathetic. He often speaks of himself in the third person — literally estranged from his emotions. Doc occasionally interrupts, trying to direct the narrative flow with questions we readers would like answered, too.
Doctorow snags us with his opening lines: "I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist. But it's not pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died." "Of what?" his listener asks. "We'll get to that," Doctorow's narrator answers. A few pages later, Doc asks, "Are you in fact the man you call your friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist who brought an infant child to the home of his ex-wife?" "Yes," Andrew answers succinctly.
We keep reading through bizarre turns and sometimes abstruse discussions of consciousness, hoping for a payoff that never comes. "You are in the depthless dingledom of your own soul," Andrew tells his students. Huh? This grieving widower observes with surprising lyricism that "love is the blunt concussion that renders us insensible to despair ... Something happens in the heart, you know. You recognize life as it should be." Self-knowledge, on the other hand, is elusive because "it is dangerous to stare into yourself. You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement. This too is the brain's cunning, that you are not to know yourself."
More On E. L. Doctorow
Books
Doctorow's Fictional Take On Real-Life Eccentricity