The basic property of a great and important American novel is that, in addition to being literary, it must necessarily have some socially significant, socially pointed sound. And in this sense, E. L. Doctorow is, of course, the standard author of the great and important American novels. From the "Ragtime" that made him famous (problems of the black population against the backdrop of the transformation of American society in the first third of the 20th century) and up to the late "March" (General Sherman's raid on the southern states during the American Civil War), Doctorow always spoke about important and weighty for the American soul and national identity.
E. L. Doctorow's works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
In this monumental series, his last novel, written shortly before his death (the writer died in 2015), Andrew's Brain, at first looks unusually chamber. In essence, this is the story of one small private life - a biography of a not too successful cognitive scientist, confusingly, with intentional and unintentional lies, plot loops and helpless bravado, set out by himself during conversations with a psychotherapist. Andrew begins his story with how, with a six-month-old daughter from his second marriage, one winter evening he finds himself at the door of his first wife, whom he asks to take the baby to raise. Gradually, the reader will learn why his first marriage broke up, how the second one developed and how it ended, and also why Andrew's own daughter turned out to be useless in general. Andrew is cunning and waggling, trying to get away from unpleasant topics, being clever, playing the fool, either exposing himself as an insensitive log, or generally trying to dissolve in his own narrative, but almost against his will, he is gradually approaching an absurdist and completely unexpected denouement.
The longer we (together with the nameless "doctor" who occasionally chimes in from the spot) listen to Andrew's chatter, the higher the author's camera rises, and at the same time our perception of the hero's fate changes. The thin isolated brook, which it appears at first, turns out to be one of the branches of the mighty river of recent American history. This story flows through Andrew, burning a trail of fire on him, but also endowing him with an unnatural grandeur. As in a drop that repeats the whole ocean, the fate of all America is cast in his fate - in fact, in a certain metaphysical sense, the frail curly intellectual Andrew, a lover of Mark Twain's prose and a specialist in the electrochemistry of the brain, becomes America for a while.
And here it is impossible not to admire Doctorow's writing skills. What any other (especially domestic) writer would inevitably turn into a pamphlet, satire or, at worst, into a social drama, in "Andrew's Brain" remains a drama primarily personal, personal. Even having dragged his hero to an unattainable height and pumped through him all the air of American history of recent decades, Doctorow manages to maintain a double focus: the drama of the country that survived the tragedy of September 11, and the drama of the man who lost the most precious thing in a fiery whirlwind, are not identified - they are separated, experienced differently and independently of each other. And this amazing trick, this almost magical ability to hold two pictures at once in the reader's eye - global and local, to combine a mosquito funeral march with the clang of universal political gears, and makes "Andrew's Brain" not just "the last novel of a great writer", but a thing that is highly significant and without such a context.
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