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Andrew's Brain: A Novel Hardcover – January 14, 2014

by E.L. Doctorow (Author)

228 customer reviews

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, AND THE THELEGRAPH

This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.

Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.”

Praise for Andrew’s Brain

“Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorow’s remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks—the best kind.”—USA Today

“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 New York Times Book Review

“A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [Andrew’s Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.”—The Sunday Times (London)

“Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons they’ve never imagined.”—The Plain Dealer

“Andrew’s ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.”—Associated Press

“[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.”—More

“A quick and acutely intelligent read.”—Entertainment Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2014: From the start of this magnificent novel, we’re told that “Andrew” has done bad things. “I am numb to my guilt … incapable of punishing myself,” he tells the unnamed man he calls “Doc.” The things we don’t know about these two men are numerous. Where is Andrew? Who’s he speaking with? A shrink? A cop? And why? It gives nothing away to state that the unraveling of those and other questions is what makes this such a strange and compelling page turner. Via the tense Godot-like conversation/interrogation, we’re slowly exposed to Andrew’s life. Or at least a version of it. “You don’t know everything about me, Doc, you’re only hearing what I choose to tell you,” Andrew says. And later: “We’re all Pretenders.” We learn Andrew gave up his daughter to an ex-wife after his second wife died on 9/11--an event that echoes menacingly throughout this wise, witty, and unnerving examination of truth and memory. The conversation between two people who clearly know each other well, but distrust each another more, keeps us on shifting ground throughout. We eventually learn of Andrew’s murky role in the basement of a post-9/11 White House, and his run-in with characters named Chaingang and Rumbum. “Jesus, I don’t know why I talk to you,” Andrew huffs more than once. Not until the final page do we discover, he must. --Neal Thompson

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A man is talking about a friend, a cognitive scientist named Andrew, but it doesn’t take long for the person listening to him, possibly a psychoanalyst, to ask if he, in fact, is Andrew. He says he is. Furthermore, he reports that he’s numb to all emotions and that he hears voices. Worse yet, he’s been living under some sort of cosmic curse, unintentionally precipitating catastrophes right and left while he walks through the flames unscathed. There is much that is eerie and odd about Andrew’s exchanges with an unidentified, mostly silent interlocutor, and the stories he tells induce us to question his veracity and sanity. Did he cause a fatal car crash? An infant’s quiet death? A woman’s disappearance on 9/11? Did he drink cocktails with midgets? Hang out with the president during their Yale days? In stunning command of every aspect of this taut, unnerving, riddling tale, virtuoso Doctorow confronts the persistent mysteries of the mind—trauma and memory, denial and culpability—as he brings us back to one deeply scarring time of shock and lies, war and crime. Writing in concert with Twain, Poe, and Kafka, Doctorow distills his mastery of language, droll humor, well-primed imagination, and political outrage into an exquisitely disturbing, morally complex, tragic, yet darkly funny novel of the collective American unconscious and human nature in all its perplexing contrariness. --Donna Seaman

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Product details

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (January 14, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781400068814
ISBN-13: 978-1400068814
ASIN: 1400068819
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1 x 8.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 228 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1700 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Metaphysical & Visionary
- #11806 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Psychological Thrillers
- #50324 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

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December 26, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Not the best thing he ever wrote that Ive read. It suffered a bit from creepy old man writer syndrome where old men authors who miss the good old days where they could pick up young attractive girls write unilkely relationships between older males and younger women. On another note, pardon the pun "Andrew's Brain" was cerebral.

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October 27, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

In some ways I think this is he best of E.L Doctorow. It is more concentrated and less historically sweeping than some of his work which I found both challenging and satisfying. Doctorow's departure last year is a great loss to us all.

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Who is Andrew? Where is Andrew? Who is Talking? Who is Listening?

July 12, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I’ve read most of his works but this is a stunningly new Doctorow. It’s not that I didn’t like his novel, it’s just that I, like a lot of you, was confused. But of course that was the author’s intent.

In the beginning, it appears that Andrew is having a conversation with a therapist, friend or psychologist. We go from first person, to third, the other character referring to “my friend, Andrew,” then speaking directly to him. Andrew, in turn speaks in the first person, then in third person speaking of himself. We learn about his two marriages, his professional life as a cognitive scientist who has gone from academia to teaching in a high school. Later, we’re told he is brought to the White House as an advisor to the president, his old college roommate. Here, he refers to himself and is referred to as “Android” by the president, a remarkable parody of George W along with his faithful cohorts, Chaingang and Rumbum.

Towards the end of the book, we realize that Andrew is in prison. We know this through references to “walls,” “the exercise yard,” and the fact that “no lawyer has been appointed,” “being held without trial,” etc., etc. Perhaps his confidant is a government prosecutor or perhaps, Andrew is stir crazy and is talking to himself!

After all the ills befallen Andrew, including the loss of his wife, Briony, a gymnast and health activist, as she jogs through the streets of New York while the buildings come down on 9-11, he is now being accused of threatening the life of the president (the college roommate) because of an insane display of standing on his hands in the middle of the Oval Office, a sudden and intuitive tribute to Briony. He has just revealed to Rumbum and Chaingang that they were “prime examples of human insufficiency.” And that he had been playing the “holy fool” to the president’s “Pretender.” They do not feel kindly towards him.

The book nears its end discussing another loss – that of Willa, his daughter with Briony, who is about to be adopted by his first wife who has cared for Willa over the last twelve years and now demands that the child never knows her real parents, alive or dead. He is being asked to sign the papers to that effect.

What happens to Andrew and where he goes now, is anyone’s guess. And his brain, I think, may have already taken off.

3 people found this helpful

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Very minor Doctorow

August 31, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

For someone like myself who loved the great Doctorow novels of the 70's and 80's, this was a major
disappointment. Hate to say it, but it was barely worth reading. Never thought I'd say that about
E.L. Doctorow. Stick with Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, Loon Lake, Book of Daniel or
The March.

One person found this helpful

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An unreliable narrator, funny and insightful, who is overcome with guilt

September 10, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Andrew, the narrator of ANDREW'S BRAIN, was a party in a terrible tragedy. "It is true," he tells his interlocutor, who may or may not be a therapist. "I accidently killed my baby girl that I had with Martha: In good faith, I fed her the medicine I believed had been prescribed by our pediatrician. The druggist sent over the wrong medicine... and I dutifully fed the medicine into her tiny mouth with an eyedropper. All night I did this every two hours, until the child stopped crying and was dead."

Andrew's reaction to this awful tragedy generates the substance of this entertaining and sometimes beautiful novel. Near its beginning, he says: "Deep down, at the bottom of my soul, if such exists, I am finally unmoved but what I've done. A faint tinge of regret for dead babies, for dead wives, for the fires I've inadvertently started, and all such disasters can make me run in my dreams to someplace where I can't do any harm, but in this waking life I am numb to my guilt."

But Andrew, in fact, was probably driven around the bend by the death of his baby daughter. And maybe all, or just parts of the tales he tells about his life after the tragedy--a second and perfect wife and little family, her unusual parents, his second tragic loss on 9/11, and his connection to the Bush White House--are imagined and his method of exploring and coping with his first tragedy.

Near the novel's end, Andrew, who is either institutionalized or a victim of extraordinary rendition, learns from his interlocutor that Willa, his daughter from his second marriage is twelve. This suggests that elements of his therapeutic stories are true. But which elements are real and which are inventions? The playful Doctorow doesn't exactly say.

At times, Andrew, a cognitive scientist, sounds like a mouthpiece for Doctorow, especially as he describes the dynamic between Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. "Chaingang and Rumbum were self-appointed world strategists. They had ranks of ideologues and think-tank warriors behind them. The president was only that... and at moments he had to feel outnumbered and outclassed. For every instance that he went along with their bidding, however persuasive and in accord with his own instincts, there had to be some resentment there, don't you think?"

Andrew also enjoys Mark Twain, whose work he shares with his second wife. Here, Andrew's Twain is primarily an old man oppressed by his life. "I see his frail grasp... his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense of his white hair and mustache and suit. He despairs of the likelihood that the world is his illusion, that he is but a vagrant mind in a futile drift through eternity." In this novel's final paragraph, Doctorow references Twain's plight and shows it has become a knife twisting in poor Andrews's brain.

Highly recommended.

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