Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow. Andrew is a professor of cognitive brain science. That means his field of study isn't just the brain as an organ, but as the ostensible producer of consciousness. He is narrating the events of his life as if he's being interviewed. But it isn't at first clear who is interviewing him, or if he is talking to himself; whether he's insane or has attained a lucidity that only seems insane. After all, when you start to seriously question from where your sense of identity comes, how—and even whether—you can really know who you are, you're bound to start sounding a bit like a schizophrenic.
We quickly learn that Andrew has suffered some horrendous stuff in his life. He has become convinced that he draws disaster down on everyone around him—while he walks away relatively unscathed. Is this further evidence of his mental instability? He accidentally killed his first child by administering a mistakenly prescribed medication. That'll unbalance anyone. His marriage didn't survive this tragedy and Andrew almost didn't either. What saved him was moving West to start life over. He got a new job teaching at a new university and there he met and fell in love with one of his pretty young students.
They eventually marry, move to Manhattan, and have a baby together. Andrew is happier than he's ever been in his life; in fact, he's happy for the first time in his life. But don't you know, it isn't going to be happily-ever-after.
This is when 9-11 unfortunately enters the story. It seems that all our great writers, from Don DeLillo to Joyce Carol Oates, feel compelled to write about this event. I'm frankly tired of it. But Doctorow does them all one better. Because it turns out that Andrew was also once the college roommate of a certain recent president whose college days are, well, hardly marked by stellar scholarship. Suddenly, it becomes clear what's happened to Andrew, where he is, and the nature of the interview.
Doctorow turns "Andrew's Brain" into an indictment of America's post-9/11 mental breakdown beginning with the dysfunctional machinations of those at the very top of the governmental pyramid. "You're not even the worse," he tells the president. "You're just the worse so far. There are even worse coming after you." At this point, Doctorow's novel loses a lot of whatever sense of reality it might have had, and becomes a parable about what happens when paranoia, greed, stupidity, and raging egoism rein supreme in men's consciousness. You get a world in which war is the answer to every problem, the most heinous aggression is masked by unthinking moral superiority, and a people become completely blind to their unmitigated hypocrisy as they ravage the very world in which they live like a cancer inside a body upon which it ultimately depends.
Even more, though, than just an indictment of America and it's haphazard rampage of world- destruction, "Andrew's Brain" is a thunderous judgment against humanity itself, which, in refusing to "know itself" makes the same tragic mistakes again and again. But here is where Doctorow goes one step further and where "Andrew's Brain" becomes truly chilling. Because current cognitive brain research suggests that no matter how introspective and self-reflective we may be, it's impossible to truly know ourselves. That our brains may prompt us to act before we become conscious of those actions. We are not in control. And if we're not in control, then what is, and what can we do about it, except follow along from tragedy to tragedy, saying "I'm sorry"?
Well, in the case of our insanely certain leaders, that would at least be a start.
Doctorow, coming to the end of a long and distinguished literary career, not to mention a long and distinguished life, clearly had a few things to get off his chest and he used his literary status as his bully-pulpit and "Andrew's Brain" to do it.
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