NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH,
SLATE, AND THE TELEGRAPH
This brilliant novel by 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, 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. As he peels 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. Probing,
mischievous, and profound, Andrew's Brain is a singular achievement in
the canon of an American master.
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"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
"Andrew's Brain is cunning. . . . [A] sly book . . . 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. . . . Andrew may
not be able to enjoy his brain, but Doctorow, freely choosing to inhabit
this character's whirligig consciousness, can."--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
