Spoiler alert!
If you have never read this book and hope someday to do so, and hope to be surprised by plot turns, I have to warn you that this post will give one big one away.
Still here, anybody? All right.
In our earlier posts I made clear that in the opening scene, Andrew's beloved second wife Briony is dead. Andrew thrusts his infant by Briony upon his first wife, Martha. There is no explanation of the reason for her death, and while reading the middle of the book about their courtship and life together the easiest assumption is that she was going to die in childbirth.
She didn't. Briony gave birth and there was a cozy household of three for a time. But she died soon thereafter in the collapse of the Twin Towers in the financial district of New York City on September 11, 2001. That struck me as quite a twist in a story that until then had been vague about chronology. Hence the spoiler warning above.
It was over the following two months that Andrew makes the decision that he can't do "this," raise their child. Hence the trip to Martha's place in New Rochelle.
In their brief idyll of a life together in Manhattan, Andrew supported the two of them, and for a shorter time the three of them, by contract work with publishers, specifically those publishers who can make use of credentialed cognitive scientists in reviewing manuscripts or editing proofs on that and related subjects.
After that, Andrew decided he had to leave the New York area and he headed south with the idea of taking a job at George Mason University in Virginia. The job fell through, and Andrew is soon teaching high school biology in Washington DC.
Doctorow's description of Andrew's teaching gig has aspects of an idyll, too, it turns out.
"In fact, perhaps because of the woeful condition of the school, the teachers and students seemed to bond in a fellowship of the indomitable. Then kids tacked their pastel drawings over holes in the walls, they painted their history murals, worked on their end term musical, cheered their basketball team. Teachers and students were on a first-name basis and everyone had lunch in the same lunchroom, what had been the separate dining preserve of the teachers having been filled over the years with broken equipment [including] an upright piano with half the keys missing."
This ill-maintained but amiable high school in Washington is given no name, and Andrew's stay there was brief. We are encouraged to believe that he pressed the limits of how much neurology one can include in a general biology course for teens. He displayed Galvani's famous experiment to his students. [In the late 18th century, Luigi Galvani touched a dead frog with live wires and caused its muscles to twitch as if it were still or again alive. And, yes, Mary Shelley was aware of this when she wrote the story you're thinking of right now.]
I will finish up the precis of this novel next week. More spoilers to come.
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