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Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY "ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, "AND" THE THELEGRAPH"
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 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. 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.
Praise for "Andrew s Brain"
""
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"
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Cunning and] sly . . . 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. "The New York Times Book Review"
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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
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Andrew s ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous. Associated Press
An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness. "More"
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A quick and acutely intelligent read. "Entertainment Weekly"
"From the Hardcover edition.""
Author Notes
E. L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx, New York. He received an A.B. in philosophy in 1952 from Kenyon College and did graduate work at Columbia University. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1953-1955.
He began his career as a script reader for CBS Television and Columbia Pictures and as a senior editor for the New American Library. He was editor-in-chief for Dial Press from 1964 to 1969, where he also served as vice president and publisher in his last year on staff. It was at this time that he decided to write full time.
He wrote novels, short stories, essays, and a play. His debut novel, Welcome to Hard Times, was published in 1960 and was adapted into a film in 1967. His other works include, Loon Lake, The Waterworks, The March, Homer and Langley, and Andrew's Brain. He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1986 for World's Fair and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1976 for Ragtime, which was adapted into a film in 1981 and a Broadway musical in 1998. Billy Bathgate received the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1990. The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate were also adapted into films. He received the 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for his outstanding achievement in fiction writing. He died of complications from lung cancer on July 21, 2015 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Doctorow's latest novel-structured as a series of conversations between a neuroscientist named Andrew and an unknown man at an unknown location-tells the story of Andrew's life, while raising questions about memory, human consciousness, free will, and the mind. Narrating his own work, Doctorow delivers a winning performance. His reading is well paced and clear, and he does just enough to ensure listeners can differentiate between Andrew and his interlocutor. Additionally, Doctorow's voice is imbued with a vulnerability and tenderness that work to add poignancy to his narration. While the author could have done more with character voices, his knowledge of his characters is clearly on display and this allows him to capture the spirit of his book. A Random House hardcover. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A man is talking about a friend, a cognitive scientist named Andrew, but it doesn't take long for the person listening to him, possibly a psychoanalyst, to ask if he, in fact, is Andrew. He says he is. Furthermore, he reports that he's numb to all emotions and that he hears voices. Worse yet, he's been living under some sort of cosmic curse, unintentionally precipitating catastrophes right and left while he walks through the flames unscathed. There is much that is eerie and odd about Andrew's exchanges with an unidentified, mostly silent interlocutor, and the stories he tells induce us to question his veracity and sanity. Did he cause a fatal car crash? An infant's quiet death? A woman's disappearance on 9/11? Did he drink cocktails with midgets? Hang out with the president during their Yale days? In stunning command of every aspect of this taut, unnerving, riddling tale, virtuoso Doctorow confronts the persistent mysteries of the mind trauma and memory, denial and culpability as he brings us back to one deeply scarring time of shock and lies, war and crime. Writing in concert with Twain, Poe, and Kafka, Doctorow distills his mastery of language, droll humor, well-primed imagination, and political outrage into an exquisitely disturbing, morally complex, tragic, yet darkly funny novel of the collective American unconscious and human nature in all its perplexing contrariness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"I'VE always responded to the history of my times," says the beleaguered narrator of "Andrew's Brain," almost ruefully, as if he wished it weren't so. He has no choice, though: Responding to the history of one's times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by E. L. Doctorow, who has in his half-century of writing fiction placed a remarkable number of people, both real and imagined, in their history just to watch them respond. At first Andrew, whose time is the bewilderingly eventful opening decade of this century, doesn't sound like much of a witness : A self-described "freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz," he seems far more interested in the workings of his own mind than those of the world outside, and for a long time speaks - to someone he calls Doc - only of his messy private life and his largely fruitless research into the mysteries of the human brain. He cracks cynical jokes, tells parts of his life story in the third person, indulges in a fair bit of glib self-analysis ("I am finally, terribly, unfeeling") and generally plays the fool. "Andrew's Brain" is cunning. It isn't hard to figure out that Andrew is an unreliable narrator, but by the end of this sly book Doctorow has you wondering if there's any other kind. That, in any case, is the perspective of the hero, whose scientific studies and puzzling life have together brought him to a pretty dim view of our neurological system's trustworthiness. "Pretending is the brain's work," he explains. "It's what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself." This is not a sentiment to gladden the heart of a scientist - even a scientist as desultory and discouraged as Andrew. But it's a happy thought for an actor, or a novelist. Doctorow, for example, has always seemed perfectly comfortable with this sort of brain work, especially in large, exuberant historical fictions like "Ragtime," "The Waterworks" and "The March," in which he manages to think himself into dozens of different characters, great teeming mobs of them, from long gone times, and not lose his poise. He's so adept at these impersonations that he's able to add extra layers of pretending to his pretending: treating made-up characters as if they were actual historical personages, and real historical figures as if they had sprung from his own ingenious brain. His new novel isn't one of his crowded, panoramic ones. "Andrew's Brain," like its most recent predecessor, "Homer & Langley," is short and relatively circumscribed - a miniature, like a Cornell box. The cast of characters is fairly small: Andrew and a couple of wives (one ex, one dead); the taciturn Doc; an opera singer who, in his cups, likes to dress up like Boris Godunov; a pair of midgets; and, toward the end, a few well-known real-life figures from our recent political history, unnamed but brazenly undisguised. The book is claustrophobic by design, like "Homer & Langley" a kind of experiment in cognitive constraint. The previous novel told the story - very freely imagined - of the famous New York recluses Homer and Langley Collyer, who shut themselves up in their Fifth Avenue mansion and filled it with so much stuff they could barely move in it; the narrator, Homer, is blind and by the end of the story almost completely deaf, too, with, as he says, "only my blank endless mind to live in." Andrew, though in possession of all his senses, has that closed-in feeling, too. "It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind," he says. "We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us." His spiel to Doc, delivered in an undisclosed location, is his attempt to explain how he got that way, and his account, manic and overelaborate, betrays the effects of having rattled around in his pretending three-pound brain too long. Though not as long as it sometimes feels to him. At one point, near the end, he wonders wearily, "Perhaps I'm carrying in my brain matter the neuronal record of previous ages." This is a prisoner's story, the cracked apologia of a lifer. It would be unsporting to disclose too many of the particulars of the tale, which is designed to keep its listener (and its readers) off guard, to dodge and feint and hit us with its revelations only when it's good and ready. And in any event, what has happened to Andrew matters less than how he tells it to himself, how he walls himself in with words. The sense of being trapped in your own consciousness is, of course, an occupational hazard for writers, but it's not a problem you'd expect Doctorow to worry himself much about. His fiction has always seemed driven by intense curiosity about the world outside him, about the people of other times and how they lived. So it's odd that in the past few years he has seemed so interested in characters like the Collyers and Andrew, who prefer to look inward and shun the wider view. They're exotic specimens, baffled and lonely and pacing in their cages. It's touching that Doctorow should want to study them, and although they're essentially comic figures, he's strangely solicitous of them; he respects the narrow space they find themselves living in. after writing "The March," his vivid imagining of General Sherman's fierce thrust into the Deep South, Doctorow has turned in the years since to the subject of retreat: the ways in which the defeated armies of consciousness withdraw from the field of battle. 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. His homemade therapy doesn't heal him, really, and "Andrew's Brain" is in most respects clearly a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to think yourself out of pain. But the novel's tone is weirdly sprightly. Doctorow amuses himself here with abrupt, hairpin swerves of mood, from lyrical to tragic to satiric to baggy-pants goofy, and appears to be having a much better time than the character he's pretending to be. Andrew's in hell, but his creator's in heaven. And maybe that's what this wacky, dead serious novel is, in the end, all about: the uselessness and the pleasure of the mind's operations. Andrew, because he has been confined to his brain unwillingly, condemned by the kangaroo court of history, can't take much joy in its hectic machinery. One of the things that make him 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. (The novel reminds us that catastrophe can befall the not-so-innocent too.) "But it is dangerous to stare into yourself," he says. "You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement. This too is the brain's cunning, that you are not to know yourself." Andrew may not be able to enjoy his brain, but Doctorow, freely choosing to inhabit this character's whirligig consciousness, can. He pretends, and loses himself in play. It's the novelist's work. It's what he does. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
Thirty-nine years after Ragtime, Doctorow is still at it; still ambitious, still sinuous, intimate, conversational. Andrew is a neuroscientist and teacher, but his life has fallen apart. Doctorow's novel purports to be a transcription of his interactions with his psychotherapist. Andrew's burden is that he cannot get close to anyone because he seems to carry disaster with him wherever he goes; Doctorow's larger theme is what is the source of evil, and, perhaps, how do evildoers experience their own actions, explain them, go on living? Andrew wonders about his old roommate at Yale, a legacy admission - someone given a place for the sake of his illustrious forebears and substantial donations - who would someday be president of the US. Knowing who the famous roommate was, one could go in search of historical parallels, but I would rather keep reading Andrew's Brain, keep laughing at the sinister figures of "Chaingang" and "Rumbum", who are the final thinly veiled objects of Doctorow's speculation about those who cause pain, destruction and sorrow, then walk away from it. - Jane Smiley Thirty-nine years after Ragtime, Doctorow is still at it; still ambitious, still sinuous, intimate, conversational. Andrew is a neuroscientist and teacher, but his life has fallen apart. Doctorow's novel purports to be a transcription of his interactions with his psychotherapist. - Jane Smiley.
Kirkus Review
Andrew is brainier than most since he's a cognitive scientist preoccupied with the biopsychological question of how brain becomes mind--and over the course of the novel, readers discover that the workings of his mind have become increasingly problematic. Doctorow opens the story with a narrative clich--a desperate parent and infant child showing up on a neighbor's doorstep in frigid weather. In this case, the parent is Andrew and the infant, his daughter Willa. Andrew is distraught by the death of his beloved young wife, Briony, and in this distressed state, he goes to the home of his former wife, Martha, and her husband, an opera singer. One of the reasons for Andrew and Martha's divorce turns out to have been the death of their young child, a tragedy Martha continues to hold Andrew responsible for. Martha takes Willa from Andrew's hands, and by the end of the novel, we find out that 12 years have passed, and Willa has been raised by Martha and her husband. The form of the novel is largely a dialogue between Andrew and his psychiatrist, though the latter is a fairly subdued interlocutor, making the occasional comment and raising the occasional question. When Doctorow focuses his attention on Andrew, his philosophical preoccupations as a cognitive scientist, and his flashbacks to the development of his relationship with Briony, his former student, the chronicle is engaging, moving and humorous, but about two-thirds of the way through, the author loses his way. Andrew briefly becomes a high school science teacher and then (supposedly) a science adviser to the president, who had been Andrew's roommate at Yale. Brilliant in parts but unsatisfying as a whole.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Doctorow's (Ragtime) latest novel is a constrained, brief, and mysterious piece of work, consisting primarily of a series of conversations between what appears to be a therapist and Andrew, a cognitive scientist described by another character as having a gift for leaving disaster in his wake. The mystery is the where and why of these conversations, heightened because listeners can never be sure of the veracity of Andrew, whose subjects seem to range from love story to politics to philosophical mind games. Are his stories allegory, biography, or madness? The fun is in the uncertainty. The author himself narrates, and while his narration lacks the performance quality of some of the better audiobook readers, it rarely detracts from the writing, an impressive feat given how much of the book is comprised of dialog. Verdict This will appeal to listeners who appreciate a cerebral listen, masterfully constructed by one of the great American authors. ["Doctorow deftly captures the complex but beautiful vagaries of life in clean, simple language," read the starred review of the Random hc, LJ 10/15/13.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist. But it's not pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face. This was where? Martha lived then in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York, in a neighborhood of large homes of different styles--Tudor, Dutch Colonial, Greek Revival--most of them built in the 1920s and '30s, houses set back from the street with tall old Norway maples the predominant trees. Andrew ran to his car and came back with a baby carrier, a valise, two plastic bags filled with baby needs. He banged on the door: Martha, Martha! She is six months old, she has a name, she has a birth certificate. I have it here, open the door please, Martha, I am not abandoning my daughter, I just need some help, I need help! The door opened and Martha's husband, a large man, stood there. Put those things down, Andrew, he said. Andrew did as he was told and Martha's large husband thrust the baby back into his arms. You've always been a fuck-up, Martha's large husband said. I'm sorry your young wife has died but I expect that she's dead of some stupid mistake on your part, some untimely negligence, one of your thought experiments, or famous intellectual distractions, but in any event something to remind us all of that gift you have of leaving disaster in your wake. Andrew put the baby in the baby carrier that lay on the ground, lifted the carrier with the baby, and walked slowly back to his car, nearly losing his balance on the slick path. He fastened a seat belt around the carrier in the backseat, returned to the house, picked up the plastic bags and the valise and carried them to the car. When everything was secured, he closed the car door, drew himself up, turned, and found Martha standing there with a shawl around her shoulders. All right, she said. [thinking] Go on. . . . No, I'm just thinking of something I read about the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and bipolar disease. The brain biologists are going to get to that with their gene sequencing, finding the variations in the genome--those protein suckers attached to the teleology. They'll give them numbers and letters, snipping away a letter here, adding a number there, and behold the disease will be no more. So, Doc, you're in trouble with your talking cure. Don't be too sure. Trust me, you'll be on unemployment. What else can we do as eaters of the fruit of the tree of knowledge but biologize ourselves? Expunge the pain, extend the life. You want another eye, say, in the back of your head? That can be arranged. Put your rectum in your knee? Not a problem. Even give you wings if you want, though the result would not be flying aloft but more like giant skips, floating megastrides as on those tracks that are like flattened escalators moving along the long airport corridors. And how do we know God would not want this, perfecting his fucked-up imperfect idea of life as an irremediable condition? We're his backup plan, his fail-safe. God works through Darwin. So Martha took the baby after all? I think also of how we decay in our rotting coffins, and how we reincarnate, the little microgenetic fragments of us sucked into the gut of a blind worm that rises it knows not why to wiggle in the rain-soaked soil only to die on the sharp beak of a house wren. Hey, that's my living genome-fragged ID shat from the sky and landing with a plop on the branch of a tree and dripping over the branch like a wet bandage. And lo! I am become a nutrient of a tree fighting for its life. That's true, you know, how those immobile standing-fast vascular creatures silently struggle for their existence as do we with one another, trees fighting for the same sun, the same soil in which they root themselves, and strewing the seeds that will become their forest enemies, like the princes to their king fathers in the ancient empires. But they're not completely motionless. In a high wind they do their dance of despair, the trees in heavy leaf swaying this way and that, throwing their arms up in their helpless fury of being what they are. . . . Well, it's a short step from anthropomorphism to hearing voices. You hear voices? Ah, I knew that would get your attention. Usually as I'm falling asleep. In fact I know I'm falling asleep when I hear them. And that wakes me up. I didn't want to tell you this and here I am telling you. What do they say? I don't know. Weird things. But I don't really hear them. I mean, they are definitely voices but at the same time they're soundless. Soundless voices. Yes. It's as if I hear the meanings of the words that are spoken without the sound. I hear the meanings but I know they are words that are spoken. Usually by different people. Who are these people? I don't know any of them. One girl asked me to sleep with her. Well, that's normal--a man would dream that. It's more than a dream. And I didn't know her. A girl in a long summer frock down to her ankles. And she wore running shoes. She had delicate freckles under her eyes, and her face seemed pale with sunlight even as she stood in the shade. Pretty enough to break your heart! She took my hand. Well, that's more than a voice, certainly more than a soundless voice. I think what happens is that I hear the meaning and provide an illustration in my mind. . . . So, might we get back to Andrew the cognitive scientist? I find myself reluctant to tell you that I hear the soundless voices too when I'm up and about in my daily life. But why shouldn't I? There was a morning on my way to work, for instance, when I had picked up my coffee and newspaper from the deli and was waiting at a stoplight. Watching the red seconds run down. And a voice said: As long as you're standing there, why don't you fix the screen door. It was so real, so close to an actual sounded voice, that I turned around to see who was in back of me. But there was no one, I was alone on that corner. And what was the illustration you provided when you heard that remark? It was an older woman. I put myself in her kitchen doorway. It was some sort of broken-down farm. I thought it might be in western Pennsylvania. There was an old flatbed truck in the yard. The woman wore a faded housedress. She looked up from the sink, totally unsurprised, and said that. At the kitchen table a small girl was drawing with a crayon. Was she the woman's granddaughter? I didn't know. She looked at me and turned back to her drawing and suddenly violently scribbled all over it with her crayon--whatever she had drawn she was now destroying. Are you in fact the man you call your friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist who brought an infant child to the home of his ex-wife? Yes. And are you telling me that you dreamt you ran away and found yourself standing at the screen door of some broken-down farmhouse somewhere? Well, it was not a dream, it was a voice. Try to pay attention. This voice brought back to me how it was when I needed to get away after my baby with Martha had died and my life with Martha with it. I didn't care where I went. I got on the first bus I saw at the Port Authority. I fell asleep on the bus, and when I woke it was winding its way through the hills of western Pennsylvania. We stopped at a small travel agency in one of these towns and I got off to walk around the town square: It was two or three in the morning, everything was closed of what there was, a drugstore, a five-and-ten, a picture framer, a movie theater, and taking up all one side of the square a sort of Romanesque courthouse. In the square of dead brown grass was a greenish-black Civil War statue of a man on a horse. By the time I got back to the travel agency, the bus was gone. So I walked out of town, over the railroad tracks, past some warehouses, and about a mile or two away--it was dawn now--I came upon this broken-down scrabbly-looking farm. I was hungry. I walked into the yard. No sign of life there so I walked around to the back of the house and found myself standing at a screen door. And there were these two just as I'd made them up or thought I had, the child and the old woman. And the old woman was the one who'd made that remark the morning I stood with my coffee and paper in Washington, D.C., waiting for the light to change. So what you're saying is that you ran away and found yourself at the actual screen door of some broken-down farmhouse somewhere in Pennsylvania that you'd previously imagined? No, dammit. That's not what I'm claiming. I did get on that bus and the trip was exactly as I've said. The shabby little town, the dirt farm. And when I got to the house it's true that those two people were in the kitchen, the old woman and the child with her crayons. There was also a roll of flypaper hanging under the ceiling light, and it was black with flies sticking to it. So it was all very real. But nobody asked me to fix the screen door. No? I'm the one who suggested that I fix it. I was tired and hungry. I didn't see a man anywhere. I thought if I offered some sort of handyman's help, they'd let me wash up, give me something to eat. I didn't want charity. So I smiled and said: Good morning. I'm a bit lost, but I see your screen door needs mending and I think I can fix it if you will offer me a cup of coffee. I'd noticed the door couldn't close properly, the upper hinge had pulled away from the frame, the mesh was slack. As a screen door it was quite useless, which is why they had hung flypaper from the ceiling light cord. So you see, it was not a preternatural vision that drew me to that place. I had taken that bus ride and seen that farm and those two people and then blanked them out of my mind until the morning in Washington when I was standing on the corner waiting for the red seconds to wind down and heard-- You were then working in Washington? --yes, as a government consultant, though I can't tell you doing what--and heard the voice of the old woman saying more or less what I had said when I appeared outside her screen door. Except in her voice the words had a judgmental tone--as if I had given her an insight into my hapless existence, to the effect of: "As long as you're standing there why don't you for once make yourself useful and fix the screen door." There's a term for this kind of experience in your manual, is there not? Yes. But I'm not sure we're talking about the same kind of experience. We have our manual too, you know. Your field is the mind, mine is the brain. Will the twain ever meet? What's important about that bus trip is that I had reached the point where I felt anything I did would bring harm to anyone I loved. Can you know what that's like, Mr. Analyst sitting in his ergonomic chair? I couldn't know in advance how to avoid disaster, as if no matter what I did something terrible would follow. So I got on that bus, just to get away, I didn't care. I wanted to tamp down my life, devote myself to mindless daily minutiae. Not that I had succeeded. What he said made that clear. What who said? Martha's large husband. When Andrew stepped inside the front door he saw Martha's large husband putting on his coat and hat and Martha walking up the stairs with the baby in her arms while turning back the little hood, unzipping the snowsuit. Andrew took note of a large well-appointed house, much grander than the house he and Martha had lived in as man and wife. The entrance hall had a dark parquet floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw to his left a comfortable living room with stuffed furniture, and a fireplace with a fire going, and on the wall over the mantel the portrait of what he took to be some Russian czar in a long robe with an Orthodox cross on a chain and a crown that looked like an embroidered cap. To the right was a book-lined study with Martha's black Steinway. The staircase, carpeted in dark red with brass rods at the bottoms of the risers, was elegantly curved with a mahogany banister that Martha was not holding as she mounted the stairs with the baby in her arms. Martha wore slacks. Andrew noticed that she had maintained her figure and he found himself considering, as he hadn't for many years, the shape and tensile strength of her behind. The coat of Martha's large husband was of the round-shouldered style with a caped collar and sleeves that flared out. Nobody wore coats like that anymore. The hat, a sporty crushproof number, was too small for Martha's large husband's head. Excerpted from Andrew's Brain by E. L. Doctorow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
