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Andrew's Brain

by E.L. Doctorow

3.2 · Rating Details · 3,689 Ratings · 783 Reviews

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 an inadvertent agent of disaster.

Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the s ...more

Hardcover, 200 pages

Published January 14th 2014 by Random House

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Oct 17, 2013 Benjamin rated it it was amazing

PROPER DISCLAIMER BEFORE REVIEWING: Not only do I work for Random House, but I copyedited this manuscript. I hope that doesn't disqualify me from saying publicly how much I admired and enjoyed the book and how much it got under my skin for weeks after I'd finished with it.

I was fascinated by the complete removal of any security in objectivity for the reader. This book has as unreliable a narrator as can possibly be imagined, and yet I didn't find myself spending so much time trying to suss out ...more

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Nov 13, 2013 Ron Charles rated it it was ok

Shelves: guys-wandering, 9-11

Cut the music. E.L. Doctorow’s new novel is no “Ragtime.” The author who once orchestrated grand plots involving Houdini, Freud, J.P. Morgan and a host of other real-life luminaries is now working in a cramped, dark cell. Instead of the breathtaking sweep of Sherman’s “March” through Georgia and the Carolinas, “Andrew’s Brain” leaves us trapped in the airless monologue of one hapless man. Fans of Doctorow’s award-winning historical novels will find this slim book especially puzzling. But that’s Cut the music. E.L. Doctorow’s new novel is no “Ragtime.” The author who once orchestrated grand plots involving Houdini, Freud, J.P. Morgan and a host of other real-life luminaries is now working in a cramped, dark cell. Instead of the breathtaking sweep of Sherman’s “March” through Georgia and the Carolinas, “Andrew’s Brain” leaves us trapped in the airless monologue of one hapless man. Fans of Doctorow’s award-winning historical novels will find this slim book especially puzzling. But that’s clearly intentional.

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.

Alternately dejected and self-aggrandizing, Andrew describes a litany of personal failures and bizarre accidents: He drops glasses, breaks a friend’s jaw, poisons a child, diverts a stranger’s car into a pole, lets his dog get eaten alive — the list rolls on and on. “Andrew, stop,” his psychiatrist pleads. He’s a walking disaster, a human bad-luck charm.

A particularly frank acquaintance tells him, “Well-meaning, gentle, kindly disposed, charming ineptitude is the modus operandi of the deadliest of killers.” In fact, it’s fear of what calamity he might cause next that inspires Andrew to drop off a baby with his ex-wife — a desperate plan to save the child. “I had reached the point,” he says, “where I felt anything I did would bring harm to anyone I loved.”

To Andrew’s rising annoyance, the psychiatrist keeps asking, “Did this really happen?” or “So this was not a dream?” But the questionable events are usually this novel’s finest parts and certainly its most compelling. His ruined first marriage, his dismal teaching career in brain science, his affair with a sweet undergraduate: These episodes demonstrate Doctorow’s power as a storyteller, but they arrive like oases in the desert of a tedious narrative. Aside from the mixed-up chronology, we have to wade through Andrew’s banal pronouncements about the brain and the nature of mind. “Consciousness without world is impossible,” he claims — but what about novel without plot?

The problem of what’s real here and what isn’t extends beyond the dubious events that Andrew describes. Although there’s no more intriguing subject than “how the brain becomes the mind,” this cognitive scientist doesn’t seem convincingly familiar with cognitive science or recent brain research. Instead, Andrew just pops off with little pop-philosophy conundrums. Decades after Daniel Dennett, John Searle and other contemporary scientists and philosophers began writing about consciousness for a lay audience, we deserve something more sophisticated from this novel — more cortex, less vortex. It’s fine for Andrew to claim that “free will is an illusion,” but he announces this as if he’s said something revelatory. “There is nothing you can think of except yourself thinking,” he goes on. “You are in the depthless dingledom of your own soul.”

Please, let’s leave my dingledom out of this.

Tellingly, Andrew sounds much more conversant with American literature, particularly Mark Twain’s work, which is closer to Doctorow’s skill set as a longtime English professor. Indeed, thematically, this novel echoes the cynical solipsism of Twain’s last attempt at a novel, “The Mysterious Stranger.” Andrew also speaks movingly about Twain’s struggle with depression: “I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard left 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, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes. He despairs of the likelihood that the world is his illusion, that he is but a vagrant mind in a futile drift through eternity.”

But beautiful, emotionally genuine passages like that must vie in this novel with some surprisingly trite sections. Isn’t it awfully late to be using little people — whom Andrew nervously calls “diminutives” — for comic, surreal effect? Worse is the final quarter of the novel, set in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks. With its well-worn vision of George W. Bush as an inept frat boy surrounded by maniacal advisers, the story stalls in limp political satire passed off as bitter historical analysis.

In the end, “Andrew’s Brain,” like Andrew himself, is merely a pretender — claiming more profundity than it can deliver, offering us something elliptical and vague as a simulacrum of intellectual provocation. Novelists such as Richard Powers and Alex Shakar have shown what a boundlessly fascinating subject the relationship between brain and mind can be, but exploring that issue in a meaningful way requires more than a collection of dramatic gestures and philosophical koans. When Andrew describes himself as a “fake person,” he has diagnosed the problem with this novel.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta... ...more

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Oct 10, 2013 Abby rated it liked it

Shelves: 2013

I've been reading E.L. Doctorow's novels for more than thirty years, starting with “The Book of Daniel,” a fictionalized account of the lives of the sons of executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Among my favorites are “World's Fair,” the most clearly autobiographical of Doctorow's novels, about a young boy growing up in New York City in the 1930s; “Billy Bathgate,” about another New York City youngster taken in by Dutch Schultz's mob; “The March,” about the Civil War; and of course, “Ragtim I've been reading E.L. Doctorow's novels for more than thirty years, starting with “The Book of Daniel,” a fictionalized account of the lives of the sons of executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Among my favorites are “World's Fair,” the most clearly autobiographical of Doctorow's novels, about a young boy growing up in New York City in the 1930s; “Billy Bathgate,” about another New York City youngster taken in by Dutch Schultz's mob; “The March,” about the Civil War; and of course, “Ragtime,” which seamlessly blends fictional and historical characters and captures the rhythms of early 20th-century America. Doctorow novels are rich in character and plot seen through a brilliantly deployed historical lens. What then to make of “Andrew's Brain”? Surely we wouldn't pummel a writer for stretching his imagination and heading off in a new direction to contemplate the workings of the mind, its relationship to the brain, and the meaning of thought and memory. But Doctorow's fans may be disoriented for the better part of this book's 200 pages.

Andrew is a professor of cognitive science and so has a professional as well as a personal interest in the working of the mind, especially his own. The novel takes the form of a dialogue with a therapist in which Andrew recounts his past as the agent of inadvertent disaster, most notably how he came to lose two wives and two daughters and how he came to hang out in the White House with George W. Bush and his henchmen, Chaingang and Rumbum. Entertaining for sure. And sad, as our surpassingly unreliable narrator becomes more clearly unhinged.

Doctorow has lost nothing as a literary stylist and once you adjust to the lack of a driving plot and start to appreciate the gradual peeling back of layers of thought and memory, there are pleasures to be found here. But I couldn't help but feel that maybe those new to Doctorow would find “Andrew's Brain” more compelling than longtime fans. Living in Andrew's brain just wasn't as interesting as being transported to 1900's New Rochelle, a Civil War battlefield or even Homer and Langley's crumbling brownstone. ...more

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Dec 31, 2013 L Fleisig rated it it was amazing

"Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion? "

In his book The joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten describes the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Both types of people suffer from chronic bad luck of one sort or another. The difference is that while the schlemiel is the type of person that trips while carrying a tray of soup in the cafeteria, the schlimazel is the person it "Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion? "

In his book The joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten describes the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Both types of people suffer from chronic bad luck of one sort or another. The difference is that while the schlemiel is the type of person that trips while carrying a tray of soup in the cafeteria, the schlimazel is the person it lands on. In E.L. Doctorow's compelling new novel, Andrew's Brain, the protagonist Andrew is the schlemiel whilst all those closest to him end up being schlimazels.

Although not technically a mystery this book is one which can easily be spoiled by too full a description of the narrative. So I will start with some broad brush strokes and leave the rest to be discovered by the reader.

Andrew is talented and smart; he is a cognitive scientist with multiple degrees. His life, if his interior monologue is to be believed, has been dogged by a series of unfortunate events. Those events have left him physically unharmed. The physical harm involved has always struck those closest to him. The story is told mostly through the voice of Andrew's interior monologue and in snippets of conversation with another person, perhaps a psychiatrist or some other person tasked with getting Andrew's story told.

But the lack of physical harm is no indicator that Andrew has not been damaged and it appeared clear to me from the start that Andrew's monologue was really getting to the edges of his role in these events. Doctorow paints around those edges and it appeared to me that the reader is left to cut through those edges and find some way to burrow between the lines and dig deeper into Andrew's brain.
Andrew's Brain is one of those books that had me puzzled from the start. After the story ended I was still puzzled in many respects but it was a puzzlement that left me thinking about the story and its meaning well after I finished reading it.

I had a visceral reaction to the story. Unsettled as I may have been at not having Andrew's deeper thoughts explained to me it left me no alternative but to personalize the events and substitute my brain for Andrew's. What would I have thought, how would I have reacted, how would I attribute fault, if fault there was, for the events that transpired around me. Would I blame myself? Did my thoughts presage or facilitate these events? Lastly, and this is the key question the book posed for me: would I have stayed sane and would my own `interior monologue' represent a memory of actual events or would it represent some parallel universe of my own creation designed solely to protect me from some paralyzing pain induced by these events. Would I be cognitive enough to know the difference?

As noted above, it is hard to discuss this book adequately without laying out critical spoilers. And that for me is an indication of the power of the book. It is a book that is enriched by discussing it afterwards. I do not belong to any book clubs but this seems to me to be a book club's dream, one that would create a rich discussion in which it is likely that every member will have a different vision of what it said and what it meant to them.

I very much enjoyed Andrew's Brain. It is a book I continue to think about and for this reason alone I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone willing to put their brain in Andrew's place, look at a life filled with sadness, and reflect upon how their own brain would hold up to the stress.

...more

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May 23, 2013 Diane rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: unfinished, modern-fiction

This novel was too bizarre and scattered and I couldn't finish it. The narration jumps all over and I didn't care enough to see if the ending gets better. If you're a fan of experimental fiction, you might appreciate this more than me.

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Aug 30, 2013 Mike rated it really liked it

I have tried to think of a word - a single word that is suggested by reading this book. Fascinating is too remote, to inexact. Surprising has no real connotation. Unsettling is good because it reflects the fact that the narration is of a type I am not used to reading and it takes time to be brought in to Andrew's brain, Not the book title, but the neurological narrator. Insightful? Yes, but while the brain takes us on a path that is convoluted, like the brain itself, and it provides social and p I have tried to think of a word - a single word that is suggested by reading this book. Fascinating is too remote, to inexact. Surprising has no real connotation. Unsettling is good because it reflects the fact that the narration is of a type I am not used to reading and it takes time to be brought in to Andrew's brain, Not the book title, but the neurological narrator. Insightful? Yes, but while the brain takes us on a path that is convoluted, like the brain itself, and it provides social and political commentary, it is also muddled and at times confusing. It is not always pleasant, it is often unpredictable, the antagonists are neither likable or horrible. The events are both world shaking and mundane. Maybe the word I want is provoking.

Doctorow has found a new voice - the brain - but of course the brain, while it controls speech, controls or manipulates thought cannot express itself without the resource of the person and in this case the presence of the psychiatrist who is us because it is the interjection in a stream of consciousness.

Life and death, perspectives on others and insights to the self, presidents and 9/11 athletics and intellectualism are all here in the players and in the perspective of who we are. Andrew is not just the owner of the brain, he is in fact a brain scientist and the psychiatrist is trained to probe and challenge the brain.

We see the brain in this as outside the individual. The brain can generate thought, expand beyond the immediate reality. It can conjecture, it can analysis and it can create decision or indecision. It is conscious and unconscious and which is us? It is a computer and it is an emotional sponge. It misfires and it makes insightful conclusions. It is a mind and a soul if we let it be. It is the function that truly stops life, more than the heart and lungs and tissues. So this ride through a life is incomplete because it is streaming images and ideas and events in a way that only a brain could perceive them or at least the way that the author sees a brain sorting out the world.

And therefore it is not always sequential and images flash by that we want to hold on and examine, but they move past quickly because the destination is somewhere else. The psychiatrist occasionally inserts a statement that the reader might want to make - why did it take so long to say that? But of course that is because the brain of the psychiatrist is like the reader - outside the brain that is spilling a sequence that can only come from one source - the self in the center of the tale. Or perhaps it is a collective mind with patches of previous existence - all existence.

The reader will find a mind in despair, we are not privileged to know where the story will take us, how it will end, even if it will end and as a reviewer I cannot tell you the ending - I can only share the journey. ...more

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Nov 26, 2013 Jill rated it it was ok

Shelves: first-reads

I received Andrew's Brain as a First Reads Giveaway. If you're interested in reading the ramblings of a self-adsorbed man who lacks maturity, then this book is for you. If you’re looking for a book with plot or direction, then you’re not going to find it here. I assume that part of the allure of this book is supposed to be the fact that Andrew’s thought patterns are quirky and unique, but I believe it could have been achieved more effectively. I didn’t care about Andrew (or any of the characters ...more

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Jan 28, 2014 Jason rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, read-2014

4.5 Stars

“I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?”

Wow, what a read! Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow is an exercise in mental manipulation. Our protagonist Andrew is a professor of cognitive science. He studies the mind, not the brain…Andrew gives the definition to unreliable narrator and as a result this story is not an easy read.

First, this is the first E.L. Doctorow book that I have rea ...more

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Jan 25, 2014 Nancy Oakes rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-fiction

Let me just say at the beginning here that I loved this book, but I didn't realize how much I liked it until it was over. Add this one to your list of most-unreliable-narrator novels, or just to your list of books you should definitely read. It is a novel filled with surprises, the entire book a conversation between Andrew, a cognitive scientist whose life up to this point has been one of inadvertent disaster, and a psychotherapist/psychologist/shrink to whom he tells his "not pretty" story. Or
Let me just say at the beginning here that I loved this book, but I didn't realize how much I liked it until it was over. Add this one to your list of most-unreliable-narrator novels, or just to your list of books you should definitely read. It is a novel filled with surprises, the entire book a conversation between Andrew, a cognitive scientist whose life up to this point has been one of inadvertent disaster, and a psychotherapist/psychologist/shrink to whom he tells his "not pretty" story. Or maybe not, depending on how you choose to read it. So -- this post won't be a standard book discussion, but more my reaction to the novel, since it is really one of those books where the reader makes up his/her own mind about what's actually going on. Or not. Plus, it would sort of be unfair to spill its contents -- doing so might throw prospective readers into major spoiler alert territory. I'll say this: Andrew's Brain is something very different than anything I've seen before. Forget the usual linear narrative format, and forget any kind of basic quasi-understanding normally provided by the author that all will be explained. The book focuses on how we view brain and mind, memories, free will and fate, truth and deception, and overall how we see ourselves. At the same time, Andrew muses about the mind as a "kind of jail" for the brain, which according to him, can often pretend to be one's soul, posing the question of one's ability to actually know and understand one's self.

Reading this novel took me on an interesting ride. The narrative started feeling way too random and repetitive at times, and while my normal thing to do when I read a novel with an unreliable narrator is to try and figure out what's really going on, this time I started getting frustrated and felt like giving up. But then I thought, this is E.L. Doctorow, an author I've been reading for years, so there's got to be something here I'm missing. So midway through, I started completely over, relaxed, and changed my own way of thinking about the whole thing. Suddenly the randomness and the flashes of repetition made sense, as I came to realize that this book is offering an opportunity to look through a window at how this person's traumatized brain works, making for a much better reading experience and allowing me to become more comfortable with what was going on here.

Andrew's Brain is definitely a novel where a) the reader is left to judge for himself/herself just what might be going on during these conversations, and b) you have to think outside of the box, freeing yourself from whatever expectations you might have as soon as you open the book. With apologies for being so vague here, I don't want my take on it to ruin anyone else's appreciation. This novel is getting very mixed reviews, but I found it intriguing and I had a lot of fun trying to figure things out after I'd finished it, coming up with several different interpretations of what I'd just read, all of which made perfectly good sense to me. It's often funny and is populated by some very interesting characters here and there; at the same time, it can be downright heartbreaking.

You can find professional reviews that will tell you more, but I'd strongly suggest not reading them. My thanks to the people at Random House -- I've given my ARC to another reader and bought a real copy of this novel to revisit later. The challenge of going through it again is just irresistible. ...more

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Oct 14, 2016 Cosimo rated it liked it · review of another edition

Il mondo è un posto sicuro

“Siamo tutti impostori, dottore, anche tu. Specialmente tu. Perché sorridi? Fingere è il pane quotidiano del cervello. È quello che fa. Riesce perfino a fingere di non essere se stesso. Ah sì? E che cosa sa fingere di essere, tanto per fare un esempio? Be', per lunghissimo tempo, e fino all’altro ieri, l’anima.”

La voce narrante di Doctorow è inaffidabile, crea sconnessione e disarticolazione. Il protagonista insegue una visione coerente del mondo, cerca ostinatamente un Il mondo è un posto sicuro

“Siamo tutti impostori, dottore, anche tu. Specialmente tu. Perché sorridi? Fingere è il pane quotidiano del cervello. È quello che fa. Riesce perfino a fingere di non essere se stesso. Ah sì? E che cosa sa fingere di essere, tanto per fare un esempio? Be', per lunghissimo tempo, e fino all’altro ieri, l’anima.”

La voce narrante di Doctorow è inaffidabile, crea sconnessione e disarticolazione. Il protagonista insegue una visione coerente del mondo, cerca ostinatamente una coscienza delle cose e disperato aspira alla consapevolezza, ma rigoroso e tragico fallisce ogni tentativo, come in una scienza del disastro. Il viaggio nella mente di Andrew, scienziato cognitivo, è pieno di sarcasmo e disgrazia, il suo amore per la studentessa e seconda moglie Briony è doloroso e muto, la sua esistenza si trasforma in una messinscena delirante e incontrollabile, tra le vicende drammatiche e assurde della storia e un'individualità svuotata di ogni razionalità e ordine; Andrew è una specie di pericolo pubblico, di indesiderato e sfortunato e clownesco pseudo-soggetto, perseguitato da una maledizione, da una malasorte inedita, che lo porta alla follia. Un automobilista ha un incidente a causa sua; il suo cane viene assalito nel parco, la sua prima figlia è vittima di una sciagura. Così i suoi errori e la sua sofferenza rispecchiano quella di un paese intero, del quale si indaga l'inconscio con delicatezza e con sapienza, e una buona dose di humour. Due cose proprio non mi sono piaciute: l'invenzione infelice di due personaggi, i genitori di Briony, che sono individui diversi intelligenti e gioiosi e la satira politica sui falchi della compagnia Bush, decisamente trattati con stile di basso livello, per quanto inquietanti e credibili. Un testo angosciante e irriverente, con buone suggestioni ma esiti non sempre ispirati. La vita è una malattia impenetrabile, in certi casi, secondo l'autore, e la letteratura un mestiere misterioso, un esperimento maniacale che ne allevia o asseconda i sintomi. Tra sensi di colpa e paradossi cognitivi, una storia metaforica e fredda, che discorre del presente con allucinata forza predittiva. ...more

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Jan 24, 2014 LitReactor added it

Yes, this is not the E.L. Doctorow you know. Don't bug out, though, okay? I mean, the dude is 83 and has won or been nominated for every major fiction award since his career began in 1960. Let's cut him some slack, yeah?

Really, you should. Because Andrew's Brain is — oh, I'm trying not to overreact here, believe me, but... — in fifty years, this may be one of those kinda-sorta career-defining novels.

I know, I know. Ragtime! Billy Bathgate! The March! Dude's got chops. Dude's got a shelf full of ...more

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Aug 27, 2013 Megan rated it it was ok

Shelves: library-thing

...hmm.

The word that came to mind while reading this is "self-indulgent". The narrator, Andrew, who refers to himself in the third person sometimes for no apparent reason, is a faceless, unidentifiable, and unsympathetic character prone to psychobabble ramblings and laundry lists of how he's been responsible for random tragedies throughout his life. The one question that kept me reading was: How did Briony die, and was Andrew responsible? The answer is... really? You went there? Then, he ends up ...more

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Aug 04, 2013 Tweller83 rated it did not like it

Shelves: adult-read, giveaways-won, srblc-13-14-sbl-read

**I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review.**

This was a waste of my time. It made me feel stupid because I really couldn't follow it, it made no real sense and I didn't even care about the character. If I hadn't said I would review it, I wouldn't have finished it.

Next day: After thinking about it more, I think I understand a little more what the author was trying to do, however he didn't make me care enough about Andrew to care what he thought ...more

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May 25, 2014 Callie rated it liked it

So. That was weird. It seems there are two possibilities here. Either I am way out of my depths and too obtuse to cotton on to what Doctorow is trying to do, or he is, in his old age, going a bit dotty.

I'm reading along, and yes I know the narrator-- since this is I'd say, a confessional novel and we know he's talking to some kind of therapist-- I know he's unreliable, but you get to a certain point and you wonder how far gone is this Andrew person, can you trust anything he's said so far? Delu So. That was weird. It seems there are two possibilities here. Either I am way out of my depths and too obtuse to cotton on to what Doctorow is trying to do, or he is, in his old age, going a bit dotty.

I'm reading along, and yes I know the narrator-- since this is I'd say, a confessional novel and we know he's talking to some kind of therapist-- I know he's unreliable, but you get to a certain point and you wonder how far gone is this Andrew person, can you trust anything he's said so far? Delusions of grandeur. Some kind of nut? Or are we really to believe that he knows these famous people he is claiming to have access to? I don't think we ever get the answer to that question. I sure didn't get it.

Is Doctorow trying to point to the insanity of the previous (Bush) administration? The insanity of this entire country in general? Did Doctorow start writing one novel and not know how to end it or get bored, and so took a sharp turn and start in on a new novel? An abrupt end provides no explanations. Well, it's EL Doctorow, so he can do anything he wants. . .

Here's what I like: the way Doctorow can use just a few words to suggest a thing, and yet you can see it as clear as if it was a movie playing out in front of you. I can really respect that. It's a beautiful thing, it's a gift. I could see Briony, I could see her parents' house and her parents, I could see Andrew, and the great hulking husband of Andrew's ex wife, and the university campus in the Wasatch mountains--all of it.

And I know Doctorow is alluding to BIG ideas here, about cognitive science, consciousness, what makes us human, the difference between brain and mind, the question of how far science will go to create a conscious being. Maybe if I thought and wrote longer and harder about this novel I'd come to some cogent conclusions.

Still, though, what if a nobody wrote a novel like this? A story that started out one way and took a strange turn and became something, seemingly, altogether different, and then didn't resolve itself at all, would anyone publish it? I think not. They'd tell you to go 'back to the (proverbial) old drawing board.'

There are many allusions to Mark Twain and I'm sure Doctorow is wanting to be known as a literary descendant. But this book didn't remind me much of Twain, instead I kept thinking of Nabakov's Lolita. Dirty old man falls for an innocent young thing and takes her across America, to her ultimate demise. Andrew's not that likable.

And, may I just say that Doctorow doesn't understand women. He can't make them come to life. I know, I know. But still it makes me crazy. What if Jane Austen hadn't known how to imagine men or write male characters? Hmmm? Would she get ANY respect? But Hemingway, Salinger, Styron, Doctorow, and the list goes on and on of the venerable writers who can't write a believable female character. Yes, you say, but Doctorow knows that Briony isn't well rounded, he even alludes to it. Well. That doesn't get him off the hook. Don't tell me he does it on purpose to try and make some point about something.

I don't know maybe Briony is supposed to represent something good and pure about America that got destroyed in 9/11? Anyway, I don't think this one will stick with me, just evaporate. ...more

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Oct 03, 2014 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-authors-not-list-book, twenty-first-century

It's sad to realize there will never be another new novel from Doctorow. The writing is such a pleasure to read. Descriptions of this novel speak of an "unknown interlocutor" but it is clear very early, that this unknown interlocutor is either a psychiatrist or psychologist. Andrew tells of his life thus far, but also wanders off philosophically and scientifically.

The psychiatrist sometimes asks Andrew if something happened in a dream or was it real. Can we ever be certain? Andrew does wander i ...more

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Sep 10, 2013 Gabrielle rated it it was amazing

A unique and fascinating book. The story, which seems to be Andrew's 10 sessions with his psychiatrist about the disasters that keep befalling his life, is tragic, funny and insightful. I loved the way E.L. Doctorow brilliantly showed the way memories stream and shift into consciousness through the dialogue between the two characters. At the beginning of the book I abhorred Andrew's narcissistic, cold narrative but as his sessions continued with his sometimes patient, sometimes inept therapist, ...more

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May 07, 2015 Kamil rated it liked it

Shelves: owned-books, 2015, owned-read

That was a surprisingly good book. I went into it not knowing what to expect. It was my first Doctorow novel. The wiring is impeccable, the flow of narration spotless, the idea original and it's execution skillful. 3 stars only bcd of it being a bit narrow in scope. Short novella which although I enjoyed immensely felt like something that would be better suited for a bigger novel. I feel like I skimmed through it barely touching the surface of something potentially great. Sill would recommend it ...more

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Jan 16, 2014 Terri Jacobson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, literary-fiction

E.L. Doctorow is an amazing writer. In this book, the protagonist Andrew is a cognitive scientist, and he is having a conversation with an unknown person--he could be a psychiatrist, or is he some other form of interlocutor? The story unfolds slowly and almost without the reader knowing it. The prose is so good you can get lost in it, but the underlying intention is always there and pays off in a big way. The book is psychologically demanding and the writing is beautifully lyrical. This book is ...more

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Jan 11, 2014 Irene rated it really liked it

This short volume functions as a character sketch rather than a novel. It is the conversation (more of a monologue) between a man who has suffered some sort of psychotic break and his psychiatrist. It is never clear what is fact and what is fantasy, what is memory and what is delusion. But through this psychotic recounting of this man’s life, the insanity in much of society is brought into question. Andrew is the “holy fool: to a society that is a grand “pretender”. This is less of an engaging r ...more

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Apr 03, 2014 Scott Southard rated it it was amazing

I reviewed this book on WKAR's Current State. You can listen to my book review here: http://wkar.org/post/book-review-andr...

You can also read my book review below.

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Book Review: Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow

When your mind often swims in the written words of others sometimes the water can get a bit muddy. You don’t mean for this to happen, but plots might intermingle in your head, characters might meet up even though they are in different stories and sometimes, honestly, you might point the fin I reviewed this book on WKAR's Current State. You can listen to my book review here: http://wkar.org/post/book-review-andr...

You can also read my book review below.

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Book Review: Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow

When your mind often swims in the written words of others sometimes the water can get a bit muddy. You don’t mean for this to happen, but plots might intermingle in your head, characters might meet up even though they are in different stories and sometimes, honestly, you might point the finger at a possible murderer, not realizing right away that they are from another book and, of course, perfectly innocent. That is sometimes how my brain works.

What gets my brain out of these reading doldrums is something new, something exciting. I love it when a writer challenges himself and me as a reader. And one recent example of this, which I highly recommend to my fellow literary swimmers, is Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow.

There are so many different ways you can read this fascinating novel. One way is a very literal interpretation. This book is the transcribed sessions between Andrew and his psychotherapist. Andrew’s life is filled with misfortune and dark humor. The story begins with him abandoning his child after the heartbreaking loss of his wife. How she died and why he did this become clear as the story unfolds. Andrew’s story is the story of our country over the first decade of this century, with the tragedy of 9/11 and even a surprising and playful appearance by President George Bush.

Another way you can interpret the book is that none of this is true. Not a single word. These conversations are not in our reality but are taking place in Andrew’s mind and he is a mental patient playing with possibilities, influenced by the world and its events. There is not any clear indication that his doctor is even in the room with Andrew. Making the book a collection of rants from a very interesting mad man.

The third way to break down Doctorow’s work is my favorite. It is an examination of the creative process and you are experiencing firsthand the working mind of the novelist, continuously getting inspired by events in the real world, playing with ideas, and then discarding them for others. This interpretation of the novel would explain the almost stream of consciousness vibe to the storytelling and the nitpicking that his doctor sometimes does around Andrew’s stories, sounding more like a well-schooled editor than a therapist.

Andrew’s Brain will challenge you as a reader; it will make you question your perspective on a story and on a character. It might even make you wonder about the understood truth of your own past and what you choose to believe. I finished this book quite a while ago and my own mind is still haunted by it, still debating its meanings.

Yes, this is another kind of muddy literary water to drown in, but a good kind. One that shows again the great potential for literature and how impactful it can be as an artform. Andrew’s Brain is a lake worth jumping into. There is something for all brains to swim in. ...more

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Jul 22, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it really liked it

The Mind/Brain Problem

This was a wonderfully easy book to get into and enjoy; now I just need to figure out what it was about! Although there are no quotation marks, it seems to be a dialogue: a man whom we later identify as Andrew talking to what appears to be some kind of psychologist, someone who studies the mind. Andrew himself is a cognitive neuroscientist; he studies the physical brain. On one level, Doctorow seems to be examining the distinction between the two, as though Andrew's mind we The Mind/Brain Problem

This was a wonderfully easy book to get into and enjoy; now I just need to figure out what it was about! Although there are no quotation marks, it seems to be a dialogue: a man whom we later identify as Andrew talking to what appears to be some kind of psychologist, someone who studies the mind. Andrew himself is a cognitive neuroscientist; he studies the physical brain. On one level, Doctorow seems to be examining the distinction between the two, as though Andrew's mind were behaving in ways that Andrew's brain alone cannot explain.

There are strange discrepancies in the narrative at first. Andrew refers to himself mainly in the first person, but occasionally in the third; is this perhaps his brain talking, rather than the man himself? He hears voices. He relates the same event in different time-frames and different ways, yet he insists he is not dreaming. At times, the narrative tricks reminded me of Paul Auster, though the more bizarre elements here do little more than ruffle the surface of an apparently straightforward story.

Andrew seems to leave a wake of disaster behind him. At the beginning, he tells of being at his wits' end, giving his divorced first wife the baby he had with his late second wife because he cannot look after her alone. We will soon hear about the tragedy that led to the divorce. The tragedy of the second wife's death will take over half the book to emerge, but we will get there through a glowing love story that is the greatest source of joy in Doctorow's intriguing novel, and the place where Andrew comes most completely to life as an individual.

I won't say much more about the plot. It is important, I think, that Doctorow does not at first tell us how long ago these events happened, who the psychologist is, or where Andrew is now. All these things will be revealed towards the end, as the book, now broken down into ever-shorter sections, impinges on real events in recent American history—but impinges upon them in increasingly unreal ways. There is an element of near-fantasy at the end, which makes me wonder whether Andrew is intended as a real person after all?

There is some evidence for this. One topic that interests Andrew is the question of "group brain" -- the communal consciousness that gives meaning to a colony of ants, or enables a flock of birds to fly and wheel as one. He wonders if this applies to humans, too: if there is such a thing, for instance, as a "government brain," or if a presidential election does not represent something more than a simple majority at the ballot box, but a kind of national wish-fulfillment? Doctorow has often used his novels to examine and critique specific periods in American history. At the end of this one, I was just beginning to think of Andrew less as the weirdly unreliable narrator of the first part, less even as the fortunate lover of the middle section, but perhaps simply as a symbol for the changes in the national psyche over the decade or so during which the main action takes place? ...more

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Jan 14, 2014 Washington Post rated it it was ok

"Andrew's Brain" is the rambling testimony of a depressed scientist being patiently interviewed, possibly by a government psychiatrist. Andrew flits around the events that led him here. 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.

The problem i ...more

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Nov 06, 2013 Diane S ☔ rated it liked it

A look at the inner working of the mind, in particular, our unreliable narrator Andrews. Andrew himself is a professor of cognitive science, and in an ongoing session with his therapist the reader is treated to a up close and personal look at a brain slowly deconstructing.

Doctorow has long been one of my favorite authors, but this is not one of my favorite novels. He has done many I liked better. I just don't think I ever bonded enough with Andrew to really immerse myself in what he was going t ...more

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Aug 02, 2013 Rebecca Foster rated it liked it

Shelves: giveaways-winner

I was delighted to win a copy in a First Reads giveaway. I’d never read any Doctorow before, so this was definitely an interesting introduction (though I think for the real Doctorow experience I’ll need to read Ragtime – Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin ‘prescribe’ it for the problem of zestlessness in their bibliotherapy guide The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You, after all).

Andrew has had two wives and two baby girls; one of each is dead. In a sort ...more

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Mar 07, 2014 Sheri rated it it was ok

So, I am just ho-hum with this. I like Doctorow and so maybe I'm just a bit bummed because I wasn't impressed with the transparent-y complexity of this book.

The entire thing is narrated through the lens of a conversation between Andrew and his therapist. Or maybe Andrew and his own psyche. Or, possibly Andrew and a computerized version of himself. O, potentially Andrew is the computer and the therapist is real.

In essence, Doctorow tries to convey the complexity of: "How can I think about my br ...more

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Aug 30, 2013 Brenda Ayala rated it really liked it

Shelves: first-reads

The style of dialogue in this took some getting used to, but once I was used to it it proved to be a really unusual and affecting novel. Andrew likes to talk about himself in the third person. I can only assume he does it to give himself distance from what he's discussing; it's only natural considering the subjects he chooses to talk about. The Doc is someone Andrew seems to talk about with a bit of condescension, and who does not really provide any other purpose besides being a soundboard for A ...more

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Dec 19, 2013 Celia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-fiction

I would give the book a 3.5. It is a not light, easy read. On subject matter I would give it a three. However, I liked the way of storytelling and would give the style of narration a four. It took me a while to realize that Andrew is probably talking to his mental health therapist and that Andrew, in my opinion, is insane (literally has delusions). The story winds about in terms of time and place. Unlike many other reviewers, I found I believed Andrew's version of the facts.

The book is more of a ...more

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Oct 15, 2014 Shonna Froebel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fiction

This novel is written in a series of therapy sessions. In these sessions, Andrew tells his story, sometimes referring to himself in third person and sometimes in first person. The story is told of Andrew's marriages, and how each ended. We see his troubled relationship with his young daughter Willa and his radical solution to dealing with it. We see him accused of being a walking disaster to those nearest to him and then we see why he might be seen in this way.
This novel reveals Andrew's story g ...more

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Dec 25, 2015 Andrew Georgiadis rated it liked it

Shelves: pop-bestsellers

Hyperliterate, hyperbolic

Unfamiliar with Doctorow’s work, I cannot compare this to his previous, well-regarded fiction. “Andrew’s Brain” is the story, recounted to a psychiatrist, of a middle-aged cognitive scientist and the many tragedies that have befallen him. He has found and lost love and loved ones. The novel will appeal to those who like overbearing, hyperarticulate characters who exist in that fantasy Earth wherein a good job and sharp intellect lead you down a path of utter despair. The ...more

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Feb 15, 2014 Mary rated it liked it

Shelves: literary, edelweiss

Andrew's Brain, by E.L. Doctorow
This is a short novel, but it is not an easy read. The protagonist Andrew is a cognitive scientist and an unreliable narrator. The book has a quiet, sad, sly humor and I don't pretend to even know how to rate this novel. It's Doctorow, so it should probably be a five star review, because he can write circles around everyone, but I don't have a clue as to how to describe this book. I was hooked enough to keep reading and the novel keeps throwing fresh curves that I ...more

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About E.L. Doctorow

E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer & Langley,The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, the Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidential ...more

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“I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?” — 14 likes

“Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.” — 5 likes

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