This is a hardback that was part of Chris's collection. I read it pretty much in one day. On Wednesday, 3/11, I still had a cold and I was 'sheltering at home'. The stock market dropped thousands and I was afraid to hit a gym because I was sick. What if I went to the doctor and tested positive for the Coronavirus?
The novel was a little hard to warm up to. I read almost a third of the book before I really got into it.
The novel is a kind of 'memoir' or 'confessional monologue' . Andrew is speaking to 'Doc' who may or not be his therapist.
The book begins with Andrew bringing his baby daughter to his ex-wife, Martha and her husband. The husband is an opera star and they live north of NYC- Rochelle, NY.
Andrew is a professor of 'cognitive science'. What is the difference between the brain and the mind?
Briony is his new wife. She was a student of Andrew's. They live in The Village. Briony gets into running. She runs NYC pushing the baby in a carriage.
Briony's parents are 'little people' and they live in California.
On 9/11 she was to visit her old boyfriend, the quarterback of their college football team. Briony dies and her body is never found.
Then it's revealed that Andrew was the college roomate of the president of the United States when they were both students at Yale. George Bush's name is never mentioned.
'Chaingang' and 'Rumbum' are clearly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
This is the most interesting part of the novel. It's like a subjective overview of this administration.
In the end, The President, Chaingang, and Rumbum are just using Andrew as comic relief.
From the book's page at Amazon:
"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.”
Once I got into the novel, I really liked it and it was quite compelling.
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