"Andrew's Brain" by E. L. Doctorow

As someone who studies science but reads for my own enjoyment, I don’t normally see my academic life intruding upon my leisure. Which is not to say that the two are incompatible— but the prevailing notion seems to be that the sciences and the arts are best kept distinct. E. L. Doctorow, however, cares little for this division in his twelfth novel, the frankly titled “Andrew’s Brain.” Doctorow, who has previously tackled historical terrain in “Ragtime” and “The Book of Daniel,” focuses in “Andrew’s Brain” on the titular cognitive scientist, who uses his scientific background to color the life story he relates. This setup could easily produce a hokey, awkward attempt to inject additional profundity into his work by means of complex terminology and obscure references; instead, the novel becomes poetic proof of the artistry inherent in the pursuit of science.

It is obvious that, in order to write “Andrew’s Brain,” Doctorow has done his research. As Andrew relates his tale to a skeptical therapist, he explores real questions of modern neuroscience; at one point, he speaks of “the despair” of what he studies. “You’ve got to be brave when you do science. I reacted badly to the publication of an experiment demonstrating that the brain can come to a decision seconds before we’re conscious of it.” The experiment Doctorow describes is genuine—it is considered a seminal neurobiological study and has had a profound impact on the field. For this reason, his depiction of Andrew’s response—the “despair” associated with such results—becomes a moving statement of the philosophical and emotional implications of science.

Andrew himself makes such connections explicit: Doctorow casts him in the role of a teacher, where he can simultaneously expound to his students and the readers how he interprets his field. He describes the conundrum of what the brain would be in the absence of sensation as “the depthless dingledom of your own soul,” and intersperses such abstract descriptions in his lectures with abstractions on the beauty of the student with whom he ultimately falls in love. In this fashion, Doctorow makes two elements that could easily be dull and mundane themselves—the professor’s lectures and his love affair with his student—a beautifully expressed facet of his novel’s overarching accomplishment.

But what is most clever about “Andrew’s Brain” is the various levels on which Doctorow is able to express Andrew’s (and presumably his own) conception of art and science. As the novel continues, Andrew’s narration falls increasingly into doubt until one finally discovers that some of the more unrealistic events he relates, events the therapist calls into question, could not possibly have occurred based on the novel’s timeline. One is then left with the potentially uncomfortable conclusion that they must have taken place merely in Andrew’s own brain, as the title suggests, and so the entirety of the novel is cast into doubt. But the novel itself addresses the issues of experience, consciousness, and sensation in such a compelling way that perhaps, one thinks, it doesn’t matter if the novel is imagined. Near its conclusion, Andrew asks his therapist if he is the “first computer invested with consciousness? With terrible dreams, with feelings, with grief, with longing?” The therapist, eternally Andrew’s skeptic, rejects the idea immediately, but based on Doctorow’s prior exploration of the subjectivity of experience one cannot fully agree with him. And because, here as elsewhere, Doctorow so clearly expresses the artistic side of science, one cannot say that the novel would be cheapened in any way were Andrew in fact only the simulation of a mind.

In a short 200 pages Doctorow manages to probe territory previously unexplored, perhaps because writers and scientists are often distinct populations. Thus the creative and literary implications of neuroscientific and psychological ideas—of the lack of free will, of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, of artificial intelligence—are denied entrance into the world where they could perhaps find the most meaning. The scientific has profound implications for the literary, and vice versa, and “Andrew’s Brain” is a decided testament to the arbitrary and even harmful nature of a strict division of those fields. For only a writer of Doctorow’s skill could remind us that neuroscience is not simply about manipulating cells and organs, but about attempting to discover “how that three-pound knitting ball makes you feel like a human being.”

—Staff writer Grace E. Huckins can be reached at grace.huckins@thecrimson.com