E.L. Doctorow’s new novel Andrew’s Brain is structured as a dialogue between the main character and a man called “Doc.” Jane Smiley assesses the protagonist’s primary conflict:
Andrew’s burden is that he cannot get close to anyone, not because he is incapable, but because he seems to carry disaster with him wherever he goes. This may be simply thoughtlessness – he relates an incident from his childhood in which he was sledging at dusk down a driveway into the street; when a car stopped suddenly to avoid hitting him and hit another car parked at the kerb, the driver died, impaled on the steering wheel. More tragedies follow. Accidents? Fate? Failure of intelligence? Andrew can’t decide. Doctorow’s larger theme is one that fascinates: what is the source of evil, and, perhaps, how do evildoers experience their own actions, explain them, go on living?
Edmund Gordon offers a mixed review:
[I]n spite of its neat dimensions, Andrew’s Brain is a bit of a mess. Part rambling philosophical essay, part kittenish satire, part exuberant Nabokovian game, it ends up wholly congested and confusing. But Doctorow’s balmy prose makes it the kind of mess that it’s a genuine pleasure to wallow in for a while. He has an easy, lyrical way with scene-setting and characterization (the first time we encounter Andrew’s ex-wife Martha: “It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew’s NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by peripheral things as if setting them to music”.)
He is a brilliant, careful observer of natural phenomena (of the mountains surrounding Andrew’s college town: “They took in the light, they’d bounce it down or suck it up as was their wont. It was a kind of mountain bureaucracy, and nobody could do anything about it, least of all the sun”.) And he has a poet’s flair for lovely-sounding nonsense (“There is nothing you can think of except yourself thinking. You are in the depthless dingledom of your own soul”).
In a recent interview about the book, Doctorow elaborates on his interest in the workings of the human brain:
The novel revolves around questions about the nature of the mind and consciousness. How did your study of philosophy inform your writing?
From my undergraduate days, I’ve always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don’t seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. The idea of cognition – what it is and how it works – has preoccupied me in previous novels, as it does here. Currently the neuroscientists who accept the materiality of the mind – who regard the soul as fiction – don’t know yet how the brain becomes the mind, how it’s responsible for all our thoughts and feelings, our subjective life. How this three-pound “knitting ball”, as Andrew calls it, produces our subjective life. If we do ever figure it out, that could be a glorious intellectual achievement. At the same time, it carries grave dangers, because if we understand how the brain works in all its detail, then a computer could be built that emulates the brain and creates consciousness. This is not just Hollywood movie stuff. If that ever happens, it’s the end of the mythic world that we’ve lived in since the bronze age, with all the stories we’ve told ourselves about what human life is. That could be as much of a disaster as an asteroid hitting the planet.
The Dish 