January 16, 2016
This is an example of the kind of unconventional, challenging books that I've been trying to read more of. Andrew's Brain is told in a sort of stream of consciousness style, as Andrew talks about his life (as he remembers it in his own mind, at least) to a psychiatrist (maybe). It's not totally clear where he is, but my theory is that he suffered a nervous breakdown sometime after 9/11 (his young baby momma was killed). He's a scientist who has studied the brain for much of his life, and now his brain is cracked and he's not aware of it.
It's difficult to tell where Andrew is being truthful and where his memory has been warped. The stuff about him being George W. Bush's college roommate and working briefly at the White House seems far fetched. The stuff about his ex-wife and dead girlfriend seem more down to Earth, but again, with his mind so damaged from trauma, who knows what the "truth" is?
Many of the young men I work with have suffered trauma in their lives. We typically have at least one habitual liar on our campus at a time, the kind of kids who claim they've lived through Hurricane Katrina and plane crashes, having a convenient story to match any topic that happens to come up. I've often wondered why these kids feel the need to tell such outlandish lies. Getting inside fictional Andrew's head, so to speak, reminds me how the brain can be damaged even if a person has never suffered physical trauma, like a blow to the head.
Andrew is convinced that he's cursed. He accidentally caused a fatal car accident when he rode into a street in his sled as a kid. He accidentally killed his first born child when he administered the wrong medicine, a mistake of the pharmacy (though this is a detail that the psychiatrist, whether he's real or only exists in Andrew's mind, questions). He's clumsy at best, a walking catastrophe at his worst. But, unless he intentionally killed his child and his mind isn't allowing him to remember it, he isn't evil or bad. He's a rather unfortunate person.
This book seems to have mixed reviews on Goodreads. While there's a part of me that wants the "truth" about Andrew, I think that's beside the point. We know what Andrew thinks is true, what he thinks he remembers. If he were aware of how damaged he was, what would he say to that? He describes how, in his studies, he's looked at how various stimuli can affect the brain, all its complex signals and functions that translate into thoughts and feelings. For someone like me, who works with teenagers who are more damaged than the average kid, a book like this helps me to remember that each person's experiences affect how his or her mind functions, which stimuli we react to most, that sort of thing. A joke that some of my coworkers have is that, for some of our most damaged kids, it'd be fascinating to get inside their minds and see how it works. Obviously, this is not possible, but Doctorow attempted to do something like that with Andrew here.
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