Andrew's Brain - E. L. Doctorow

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.