E. L.

Doctorow and 9/11: Negotiating Personal and National

Narratives in "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" and Andrew's
Brain

Liliana M. Naydan

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 44, Issue 2, Fall 2017, pp. 281-297 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2017.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/679891

Access provided at 16 Apr 2019 18:32 GMT from Idaho State University
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  281

E. L. Doctorow and 9/11: Negotiating Personal

and National Narratives in “Child, Dead, in
the Rose Garden” and Andrew’s Brain
Liliana M. Naydan
Penn State Abington

O
ften termed a historical novelist and even a philosopher of history by literary
critics,1 E. L. Doctorow sometimes puzzles over peculiar moments in American
history in novels such as The Book of Daniel and Ragtime, and much of his histori-
cal fiction gestures toward the dynamic relationship between fact and fiction. As Doctorow
puts it in “False Documents,” “history shares with fiction a mode of mediating the world
for the purpose of introducing meaning.”2 As a result, “there is no fiction or nonfiction
as we commonly understand the distinction: There is only narrative.”3 Yet after the ter-
rorist attacks of 9/11, Doctorow extends his thematic focus on the relationship between
fact and fiction, developing an interest in the peculiar relationship between personal
and national narratives that inform and give shape to historical fiction—a relationship
that manifested in particularly noteworthy ways following the attacks. On the one hand,
Doctorow sees the historical significance of 9/11 to the nation and to the world, calling
9/11 “an extraordinary event” that “is just the beginning of things” and that “marks the
beginning of the twenty-first century.”4 Likewise, in discussing Andrew’s Brain, a 2014
novel about the post-9/11 period, Doctorow underscores that writing about 9/11 involves
writing about the nation and national history in a broader sense: “I think of myself really
as a national novelist, as an American novelist writing about my country.”5 On the other
hand, Doctorow sees how local experiences and individual losses shaped—and continue
to shape—the atrocity. He observes that in Lamentation 9/11, a non-fictional work about
the terrorist attacks in his New York home, he sought to chronicle the “act of lamenta-

Studies in American Fiction 44.2 (2017): 281–297 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press
282  Studies in American Fiction

tion” that “came up spontaneously from the people.”6 At the beginning of what he sees
as a new era in American national history, he fashions himself as what Lucy Bond calls
“a twenty-first-century Whitman, sowing unity among New York’s disparate residents”
by way of sentimental text about everyday citizens written as a complement to David
Finn’s post-9/11 photography of New York.7
This article considers the ways in which Doctorow’s writing about 9/11 speaks
to 9/11 novels about the politics and problems of the public/private binary.8 It analyzes
the interplay between personal and national narratives in Doctorow’s two fictional
works that address 9/11 and post-9/11 America: “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” first
published in 2004, and Andrew’s Brain. I argue that both works expose the unreliability
of narratives produced in post-9/11 America or as a result of 9/11, and they do so in
order to explore new possibilities for post-9/11 personal and American national identity.
Whereas “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” represents protagonist FBI special agent B.
W. Molloy’s attempts to unearth elusive truths amid “pattern[s] of obstruction” in the
national narrative created by the U.S. government,9 Andrew, the narrator of Andrew’s
Brain, himself creates obstructive patterns in his unreliable narration of his personal
post-9/11 experiences. These patterns of obstruction may emerge out of a simple desire
for play, out of post-9/11 right-wing corruption or absurdity, out of madness induced by
the trauma of 9/11, or out of some combination thereof, and whether they are endorsed
by systems of power as dominant narratives or not, they produce noteworthy effects. In
“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” they create detrimental consequences on the local or
personal level that complement those that terrorism produced and produces; in Andrew’s
Brain, they create opportunities for personal stories to connect with the national narra-
tive of America in potentially productive ways, but arguably, they also fracture identity,
perhaps irreparably. Ultimately, however, Doctorow posits in both texts that “ordinary
citizens” have opportunities to counter the negative effects of these patterns of obstruc-
tion via everyday action as opposed to negligent complacency or sustained delusion
(133). By taking everyday action, ordinary citizens—characters in Doctorow’s works
or Doctorow’s readers—can forge a new narrative of their own identities as Americans
and of American national identity. They can push America to emerge as a more socially
responsible nation that is capable of countering the madness of terrorist acts as well as
conservative American political responses to them. They can forge a new American nar-
rative for the new millennium.
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  283

1. Patterns of Obstruction and Possibilities for Post-9/11 Action in “Child, Dead, in

the Rose Garden”

“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” never describes the historical events of September
11, 2001, in the way that many fictional works about 9/11 do, but it tells the story of
the perpetually terrified American nation that 9/11 produced, emerging as a literary
manifestation of what Don DeLillo has termed the Age of Terror.10 In the story, Docto-
row describes FBI agent B. W. Molloy’s investigation into the mysterious death of an
unidentified child found dead in the White House’s Rose Garden by groundskeeper
Frank Calabrese. The story showcases post-9/11 anxieties in America that were exploited
by George W. Bush, the American president at the time of the attacks and, it is implied,
the unnamed president featured in Doctorow’s story. These anxieties continue to shape
twenty-first century American history as the United States engages in conflicts with the
Islamic world both within and outside of its own borders, using 9/11 as justification
for an apparently endless War on Terror.11 The characters of Doctorow’s story speak of
“counterterrorist statutes” and question whether the dead child’s placement constitutes
“a terrorist act of some kind” because these characters, like contemporary Americans,
perpetually imagine the possibility of terror (121, 122). As the story’s narrator describes
it, “It didn’t matter that the event was without apparent consequences”—other than the
child’s death, of course—because “there was no place in the world with tighter security
than the White House complex” (120). In the world of Doctorow’s fiction, as in post-9/11
America, the idea of a breach is more unsettling to Americans than the consequences of
one. It is the idea that terrorists lurk in the shadows, waiting and able to strike once more,
that induces terror following the attack of 2001—the greatest security breach in America
since the War of 1812.12
Just as the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers can be read as symbolic of the
collapse of capitalism desired by al Qaeda terrorists, the child’s death and his very body
can be read as symbolic, both within the world of the story and beyond it—by the story’s
readers. The protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist acknowledges
“the symbolism of” the Towers’ collapse, “the fact that someone had so visibly brought
America to her knees,”13 and similarly, characters in Doctorow’s narrative question
whether the Rose Garden incident is “a symbolic action” akin to 9/11—an act that might
represent some ideological opposition to the United States or foreshadow some future
material opposition (124). As a psychologist consultant to the CIA observes in a conver-
sation with Molloy, the event “feels to me like an Arab thing,” and the dead boy, who
is eventually discovered to be Roberto Guzman, a child of Hispanic descent, appears to
284  Studies in American Fiction

the anxious government officials of the text as though “he could be a Muslim kid” (125).
Characters and readers alike note that white fabric is wrapped around Roberto’s corpse
to make it appear “like a cocoon” (121)—perhaps symbolic of some gestation or future
transformation, something that has changed or is changing in America. And the fact that
he is a child might be read as symbolic as well: of the atrocities that both al Qaeda ter-
rorists and American military forces might be willing to commit against the innocent in
the name of their respective ideologies or of the kind of juvenile perspectives on racial,
ethnic, religious, and national Others that xenophobic Americans might hold.
Doctorow suggests that ambiguity and uncertainty complement white Christian
America’s anxiety about terrorism and Others, giving shape to the post-9/11 Age of
Terror as experienced by characters in his story, readers of it, and Americans in general.
The story’s use of generic conventions is ambiguous, and its peculiar hybrid form is
somewhat reminiscent of The Book of Daniel.14 The story functions as both a formal report
and a mystery. The features of a formal report first present themselves in the narrative’s
opening line: “Special agent B. W. Molloy, now retired, tells the following story” (119).
The narrator’s frame suggests that Agent Molloy’s first-person account will provide
clear explanations of the kind that FBI agents or police officers gather and produce in
investigations. Yet Doctorow’s narrative provides few straightforward answers, suggest-
ing that even apparently sanctioned, dominant narratives involve and invite questions.
Readers experience the mystery of the Rose Garden incident from Molloy’s perspective,
wondering whether Molloy “was dealing with eco-terrorists” or terrorists of an Islamic
variety—or whether his “scintillating sense of a presiding amateurism in the affair”
suggests that amateurs, not terrorists, have committed the symbolic act (128). Readers
may even feel a step behind Molloy because Doctorow never has him spell out the rev-
elations about the case to which he comes. Molloy discovers that Roberto Guzman dies
of an asthma attack caused by pollution emitted into the air by the Utilicon Corporation
and that Chrissie Stevens, Utilicon CEO Glenn Stevens’ daughter, conspires with her
boyfriend Corporal Tom Furman, a retired Marine who works in the White House, to
leave the body in the Rose Garden to expose her father’s unethical business practices and
the President’s apparent support of them. But readers must infer the details that Molloy
unearths. Readers’ persistent feeling of uncertainty is perhaps similar to what post-9/11
Americans might experience as they wonder who among them might be a terrorist or
when or where a terrorist might strike next. As the story’s narrator says, there exists “a
pattern of obstruction” that shapes the narrative “from the start” (133).
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  285

Of course, this “pattern of obstruction” showcased by Doctorow exists in every

text, because authors reveal (or make public) some details while concealing (or keeping
private) others. Yet the post-9/11 context in which Doctorow writes involves the public
and private in a unique way. This context involves the very public mass media spectacle
of the Towers’ collapse and the controversial passage of the Patriot Act on October 26,
2001. And this context enhances the significance of Doctorow’s moments of obstruction.
To quote Liane Glenn in DeLillo’s Falling Man, “all life had become public” after 9/11,15
but not so in Doctorow’s fiction. Doctorow’s story pointedly underscores the insides and
outsides that his narrative creates by excluding readers from lines of sight that fictional
characters have. As Glenn Stevens’ lawyer explains to Molloy, the way in which Chris-
sie manages to commit the crime of leaving Roberto’s dead body in the Rose Garden is
“no mystery” (141). As the lawyer continues, “One look at Chrissie Stevens and you’ll
understand” (141). Molloy does look at Chrissie, and he sees what his “lady friend from
his bachelor days” attests (141)—that Chrissie “is spectacular” and a “vestal virgin”
without “a sign of wear and tear” (142). But readers never see Chrissie or fully grasp the
significance of her appearance. They never fully see what makes her a “vestal virgin.”
Readers learn that Chrissie is “strikingly attractive, very pale, with high cheekbones and
grey eyes,” and that she has a “mesmeric” voice with “a child’s soft Southern lilt” (144),
but they never experience the effect that Chrissie has on those characters who see her in
the story. Readers see only words on a page, not the revelations that are plainly seen by
Doctorow’s characters because narrator and narrative alike function as powerful forces
that narrow their vision.
Doctorow presents an analogue to narrative’s obstructive power in his repre-
sentation of the political power that can obstruct narrative. In Doctorow’s work, and in
post-9/11 history, high-ranking government officials hold power over the creation and
dissemination of stories. This power is certainly present in Doctorow’s Cold War–era
American historical fiction, but it intensifies in both his post-9/11 fiction and in history.
As Doctorow’s characters and readers work to piece together a narrative that makes
sense of the Rose Garden mystery, they see the ways in which the U.S. government has
power to form and disseminate a dominant narrative—to control stories that the public
can know. Readers see, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues, that narrative, for Doctorow,
“with its volatile images, is a political issue—perhaps the quintessentially political issue,
since its truth always depends on the power of the authorities that sanction it.”16 In Doc-
torow’s story, political figures—a fictionalized George W. Bush and allied conservative
U.S. government officials—attempt to shape the historical record, erasing and creating
286  Studies in American Fiction

information based on the image of the U.S. government (and of reality) that they wish
to present. When Molloy attempts to push his investigation despite the administration’s
desire to bury the incident, the bureau chief simply says, “the investigation is concluded”
(132). He continues, “There is no kid. There was no body in the Rose Garden. It never
happened” (132). Of course, it did happen. The incident exists, both as a part of personal
histories and of national history as it exists within the story. Although Molloy resists the
government’s desired narrative throughout the story, Molloy himself eventually echoes
the bureau chief’s language, observing that “the incident is not only closed, it never hap-
pened” (139)—because, as Stevens’ lawyer explains it, “Mr. Stevens would never embar-
rass the President, whom he admires as no other man. Or do anything to bring disrepute
to the great office he holds” (139). The attempts to erase the incident work to preserve a
narrative of the U.S. president’s good reputation at the expense of truth.
In the world of Doctorow’s story, the post-9/11 right-wing political corruption
that compromises the reliability of narratives available to the public has detrimental
consequences. And the most noteworthy of these is the condemnation or even incrimi-
nation of anyone who could expose suppressed narratives. Roberto’s parents, Juan and
Rita Guzman, know what Doctorow positions as the true story of their son’s death; they
are therefore vulnerable to the corrupt U.S. government. They know that Roberto dies
from an asthma attack caused by pollution produced by the Utilicon Corporation. And
because they know and could reveal this damning narrative, corrupt Immigration and
Naturalization Services officials detain them, trying to contain the truth. They frame
them as un-American for their capacity to denigrate those in power in America and, in
turn, the American national narrative. Chrissie is also detained for her role in the incident
and for her knowledge of what Doctorow positions as the true story, but her detention is
shaped by her position of privilege. Her father and government officials who support the
President see her not as un-American but as insane. She is a crazed activist rather than
a terrorist because of her insider American status, her wealth, and her whiteness, and so
she is placed in the relatively comfortable Helmutt Eisley Institute, a fictionalized sani-
tarium “for the very wealthy” (143). Although she is able to tell bits of her story to Molloy
when he finds her there, the general public never hears her version of events. The public
remains ignorant of her condemnation of government officials and the businessmen who
help to keep them in power—the “configured gentlemen” who are “configured to win.
And fuck all else” (146). It remains ignorant of Chrissie’s attempt to put “back among
us” the “gentlemen who run things”—to put them among the masses whom they govern
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  287

over, exploit, and even kill, as evidenced by Roberto’s death—via the “shock treatment”
of her Rose-Garden action (145).
Although Chrissie’s action eventually emerges as relatively futile, Doctorow
suggests in this narrative, as he did in a pre-9/11 interview with Hilary Mills, that there
is utility in being “sensitive to the idea of injustice.”17 He suggests that Americans must
exercise their power as ordinary citizens by addressing existing injustices in the face
of post-9/11 plutocracy and identifying government-produced fictions in the way that
authors are “ordained to contest the aggregate fictions of their societies.”18 To appropri-
ate Michael Wutz’s reading of the interrogative work of Doctorow’s novels, ordinary
citizens have power to interrogate “as mutant and uncontainable energies the dogmas
of administrative power.”19 Certainly, Molloy initially sees the “nation’s business” as it
transpires within the confines of the “long pedimented buildings” of Washington, DC, as
being “beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens” (133); he initially sees ordinary
citizens as “the believers” and “the governed” rather than as an empowered force to
be reckoned with (133). But by way of his own sequence of actions, Molloy appears to
recognize the ways in which seemingly disempowered individuals can speak truth to
power and create change in society—perhaps not undoing the actions of the corrupt, but
realizing justice when and where it is possible to do so. Molloy is “certainly no liberal”
(unlike Doctorow himself), but his scorn for “politically driven interference in a case”
enables him to take ethical action in the text (129). As part of a series of activist acts before
his retirement, Molloy calls Peter Herrick of the Office of Domestic Policy and tells “him,
though not in so many words, that if the parents of the dead child were not released by
the INS and allowed to return home, he, Molloy, would see to it that the entire incident
became known to every American who watched television or read a newspaper” (146–
147). Molloy apparently frees innocent victims of right-wing governmental corruption,
and he goes on to rewrite the narrative propagated by crooked officials. After his call to
Herrick, Molloy composes his resignation letter and then writes, “by hand, a letter to
Roberto Guzman’s parents” that reveals that Roberto’s body now rests in an unmarked
grave “at the Arlington National Cemetery among others who had died for their country”
(147). Unlike the bureau chief, who attempted to erase Roberto’s very existence from the
historical record (“There is no kid. There was no body in the Rose Garden. It never hap-
pened”), Molloy writes Roberto into history as an American hero.
By showcasing how Molloy reclaims narrative from corrupt plutocrats and
conservative government officials, Doctorow suggests that readers might, like Molloy,
transcend the conservative/liberal binary, engaging in socially responsible civic actions
288  Studies in American Fiction

(like Molloy’s) regardless of their political affiliations. Doctorow thus encourages readers
to redefine their notions of good citizenship in America as a first step to reclaiming the
post-9/11 American narrative. They might come to see through the notion that artists
and writers (like Doctorow himself) are, as Herrick says of the attendees at the Rose
Garden event at which Roberto’s body is left, “all knee-jerk anti-Americans” (129). And
they might see how Doctorow’s text critiques America in order to make it more ethical.
Indeed, critical investigation—the kind that Molloy models and that readers of Doctorow’s
text practice—unearths thorny realities of American national identity that Americans
must face, namely that America is a racist nation that values capitalist enterprises above
human beings, including its own citizens. Doctorow suggests that by facing these post-
9/11 realities and acting upon them, ordinary Americans might succeed more wildly
than Molloy. They might refashion America and Americanness as socially responsible
in the new millennium.

2. National Disaster, Personal History, and Possibilities for Redemption in Andrew’s

Brain

Andrew’s Brain, written in a noteworthy eleven parts that echo the date of the 9/11 ter-
rorist attacks, functions as a meditation on the ideas, memories, and emotions produced
by the mind as it emerges from the brain. The novel addresses 9/11 more explicitly than
“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” showcasing the attack’s immediate and long-lasting
effects on individuals and on the nation. In the novel, Doctorow portrays Andrew, the
work’s narrator, a cognitive scientist who obsesses over the mind/brain relationship,
in conversation with his psychologist, Doc, about the laundry list of disasters that have
befallen him, among them the death of his second wife (and former student) Briony in the
collapse of New York’s World Trade Center soon after the birth of Willa, their daughter.
As another character puts it, Andrew has the “gift” of “leaving disaster” in his “wake.”20
Yet of the disasters that shape Andrew’s life—disasters that include his accidental killing
of his child with his first wife, Martha, by “dutifully” feeding her mis-prescribed medica-
tion21—the events of 9/11 and Andrew’s decision to abandon Willa with Martha linger
in his mind as a deep source of stress. Andrew feels “indirect” responsibility for Briony’s
death because he moved her and Willa to his home city of New York.22 He feels that the
events of 9/11 devastated the happiness that he had found after the collapse of his first
family, causing a second collapse in his life—one that sustains a symbolic connection to
the second collapse that New Yorkers and viewers of television news broadcasts saw on
9/11 when the second Twin Tower collapsed.
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  289

Just as uncertainty gives shape to post-9/11 national feelings in “Child, Dead,

in the Rose Garden,” it gives shape to the narrative that Doctorow has Andrew relate
in Andrew’s Brain, and Doctorow thus underscores the significance of uncertainty to
the evolving narrative of the Age of Terror. The sense of uncertainty felt by readers of
Andrew’s Brain stems, in part, from Andrew’s unreliability as a narrator—unreliability
created by his playfulness. Andrew repeatedly reveals himself to be an avid reader of
Mark Twain,23 among the most playful authors in the American literary canon. Twain is
also, in Doctorow’s view,24 a highly political author, and thus akin to Doctorow himself.
For instance, Andrew references Twain’s “A Cat-Tale,” a story about a father who tells
playful bedtime stories to his two daughters and a story that incorporates words that have
cat in them. The narrator of “A Cat-Tale” aims to “instruct as well as entertain” his daugh-
ters before bed:25 he makes what K. Narayana Chandran calls “calculated and timely”
mistakes about the definitions of cat-related words and then turns to the dictionary for
their actual definitions.26 Andrew’s purpose is similar to that of Twain’s narrator. His tale
leaves readers and his psychologist perpetually amused, for example when he describes
Briony’s parents as midget circus performers who do vaudeville soft-shoe routines when
they get drunk or when he describes a helicopter’s spotlight catching him with his future
wife Briony in a sex act on the beach. Moreover, readers and his psychologist alike see that
Andrew, like the narrator of Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,”
another Twain tale to which Andrew makes reference, may seek to “put one over” on
his audience.27 As Chandran says, “the joke is on us” as readers of “A Cat-Tale”;28 and in
Andrew’s Brain, the joke is on Andrew’s audience. Andrew engages the novel’s readers
in a story that interweaves truth and lies (or at least stretched truths) in order to show
them that history emerges out of the interplay of fact and fiction. More specifically, via
Andrew’s unreliable narration, Doctorow instructs readers in reading post-9/11 history,
which emerged out of the mixture of interwoven truth and lies propagated by George
W. Bush, his administration, and the media.
Furthermore, Andrew’s unreliability as a narrator emerges out of his psychologi-
cal instability, which echoes Chrissie’s supposed insanity in “Child, Dead, in the Rose
Garden.” Doctorow characterizes this instability as a possible symptom of the post-9/11
times, especially for Andrew, who has personal experience with the attacks. Although Doc
does not diagnose Andrew within the narrative, readers see Andrew’s illeism—the fact
that he speaks of himself in the third person—from the novel’s first sentence. Andrew’s
distancing speech patterns may imply that he has a personality disorder—a disorder of
the mind gestured to by both the novel’s title and Andrew’s fixation on the mind/brain
290  Studies in American Fiction

relationship. Whatever his diagnosis, his mental illness is detrimental to him. Readers
hear Andrew say that he “had considered suicide”29 and they see him ruminate obses-
sively over incidents such as the “red seconds” ticking down on the crossing sign when
he attempts to cross a street in Washington, DC.30 And they suspect that he suffers from
post-traumatic stress disorder from losing both of his families. The stories he tells never
provide a complete picture of the harsh reality of his experiences because he often lies to
himself or seeks to manipulate his audience. For instance, Andrew seems to lie to both
himself and his audience in recounting the details of Briony’s death on 9/11. Andrew
fails to realize that his life with Briony might not have been as happy as he imagined it
to be. It is possible that Briony was in the World Trade Center not for the reason she tells
Andrew—to run flights of stairs to lose weight following Willa’s delivery—but to begin
or carry on an affair. Briony may have gone to meet Dirk, her boyfriend from college
and another of Andrew’s ex-students, a man much Andrew’s junior. Dirk worked in one
of the Twin Towers and, like Briony, died there on 9/11. Eventually, Andrew creates a
self-delusion, coming to believe that Briony “died trying to save people” in the burning
Tower,31 although no evidence exists to substantiate this belief. The possibility that An-
drew’s perspective is delusional is highlighted by Dirk himself, who draws attention to the
limits of human perception in an answering machine message that he leaves for Andrew
and Briony from the burning Tower, immediately before he dies. Dirk quotes Andrew’s
words from the college course he took with him, saying, “We don’t hear as good as bats,
see as well as hawks. You remember saying that? We can only know so much.”32 Andrew
himself, of course, may be the one with limited perception in this particular instance.33
Doctorow portrays Andrew as suffering from a sort of break from reality—one
that echoes the break in history caused by 9/11, which Doctorow’s novel represents both
in content and in form. Specifically, Andrew is unable to make connections in his mind
and in his narration—connections of the sort that Molloy and readers seek to make in
“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden”—and this inability speaks to the disconnection be-
tween pre-9/11 and post-9/11 American history. As DeLillo observes, the attacks of 9/11
changed “the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck,
and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and
it changed everything.”34 To use the language of DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,”
the 9/11 terrorist attacks left the narrative of Cold-War-era American exceptionalism “in
the rubble,” creating a disconnect that offered an opportunity for a new historical nar-
rative.35 And much like America seems to have a dividing moment in history because of
9/11, there exists a dividing moment in Doctorow’s novel. Andrew focuses on his past
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  291

romantic relationships in the novel’s first four chapters, concluding the novel’s fourth
chapter with his narration of the attack on the World Trade Center as he learns about it
from Dirk’s answering machine message. Then beginning in chapter six, his narration
shifts to focus on his experience with the American government in general, and with a
fictionalized, unnamed American president who (like the president in “Child, Dead, in
the Rose Garden”) is modeled after the historical George W. Bush. The shift in chapter five
is marked by Andrew’s writing to his psychiatrist from a fjord in Norway. This physical,
geographic gap represents the metaphorical divide that 9/11 creates in American percep-
tions of American history, and it marks the shift to Andrew’s narration of his experience
with national history.
Doctorow suggests that Americans as Andrew represents them respond to this
apparent disconnect by creating connections, especially between personal and national
history as that history evolves around them. For example, Andrew observes that he is
“a citizen sensitive to his country’s history,”36 and he attempts to forge a connection be-
tween his personal losses and traumas and the country’s responses to the attacks—the
dominant narrative of American national history. Although Andrew may be lying about
his experience with the unnamed American president of the novel, his account suggests
that he sees some connection between his own experience of losing Briony on 9/11 and
American national history as the historical George W. Bush and his cabinet members
shaped it. Or at least he intimates that he desires for there to be some kind of connection
between his personal narrative and the national narrative. According to Andrew, he
and the president shared housing and developed a friendship while studying at Yale
together—a friendship that echoes the one between Glenn Stevens and President Bush
in “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden.” This friendship eventually leads the president to
appoint Andrew as the director of the White House Office of Neurological Research after
a visit to Andrew’s high school science class. And Andrew’s connection to the president
functions as a symbolic connection to the nation. A rhetorical question that Andrew asks
articulates this connection in a pointed way: “if my mind goes can the country be far
behind?”37 And as Andrew’s psychologist asks in response, “So you’re saying there’s
a connection?”38 Although Andrew never answers the psychologist directly, observing
only that his “mind is shot through with visions, dreams, and the actions and words of
people I don’t know,”39 his response gestures toward his belief in the existence of this
connection between his mind and America.
Doctorow suggests that a connection between personal history and post-9/11
American national history can give meaning to life and personal experiences—meaning
292  Studies in American Fiction

that might otherwise not exist or that might not exist in a substantial way. The connec-
tion Andrew makes between personal and national history perhaps suggests that his loss
of Briony functions as part of a grand narrative of American loss and of rebuilding in
the aftermath of loss—loss of either national or personal identity. Mental illness ravages
Andrew’s personal sense of identity after he loses Briony and gives Willa to Martha. This
mental illness leads Andrew to observe, while he is in Norway, that “it is dangerous to
stare into yourself” because “you pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement.”40
But telling a likely imagined story about his connection to America helps Andrew to re-
conceptualize himself, for better or worse. As Andrew explains, “I had no identity without
[George W. Bush].”41 And by way of his connection to the president, Andrew comes to
see himself as being “like a shadow” Bush had “cast.”42 As Andrew later observes, he
realizes that he and Bush “were look-alikes. There was almost a familial resemblance,”43
even though Andrew’s political views differ from Bush’s, as evidenced by the fact that
Andrew “didn’t vote for” Bush in the presidential election.44 Bush and Andrew also differ
in that Bush exhibits an “anti-scientism” and Andrew dedicates his career to science,45
yet something about Bush helps Andrew to define or redefine himself. Something about
the experience of connecting his own life to the national narrative via the partly true and
partly imagined story he tells arguably helps Andrew to begin to process the trauma of
9/11, even if processing trauma never leads him beyond his delusions or shows him that
he can live beyond the shadow of an American president if he opts for social responsibil-
ity instead of madness and institutionalization of the sort that Chrissie experiences in
“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden.”
These representations of connections between personal and national history
instruct readers who can make logical connections between fiction they read and na-
tional history that evolves around them. Doctorow’s readers might contemplate their
personal relationship to absurd actions taken by the post-9/11 American government. To
American liberals, Doctorow’s representation of absurdism in the White House invokes
the characterization of Bush administration officials as somewhat of a joke in American
history—one that complements the representation of the Bush administration of “Child,
Dead, in the Rose Garden” as wholly corrupt. And if they acknowledge this joke, which
they helped to realize by way of their votes in two U.S. elections, Americans can gain
an understanding of their system of government. According to Doctorow, the fictional-
ized former Vice President Dick Cheney, known in the story as “Chaingang,” and the
fictionalized former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known as “Rumbum,” are
laughable, both because of their nicknames and in the way that they are portrayed:
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  293

“physically small, the one red of face, scowling of mouth, the other impeccably tailored
and barbered, the instincts of a peacock.”46 Likewise, Bush himself exists as part and
parcel of a joke in the novel. According to Andrew, “around him, the pressure was to be
a clown,”47 and Andrew consistently clowns around with Bush, both in college and later,
when spending time with Bush and his cabinet members. As Andrew explains, the Bush
administration puts him “in a foolscap with bells” while the world waits “for the next
civil war, the next tanking of the market, the next suicide bombing, the next tsunami, the
next earthquake, the next leakage of radioactive material from the next defective nuclear
plant.”48 The Bush administration concerns itself less with the possibility of impending
apocalypse than with distracting itself from the problems it has set into motion.
As the absurdism that Doctorow portrays entertains readers of his novel, it also
draws attention to its detrimental historical consequences. It serves a didactic purpose,
drawing attention to a less-than-funny truth: that the Bush administration contributed
to the apocalyptic anxiety and binaristic rhetoric that defines the Age of Terror in which
Doctorow’s readers live. In history and in Doctorow’s fiction, Bush and his cabinet
members appear as though they will either cause the next apocalyptic disaster or exac-
erbate it by way of their incompetence. And the absurdist actions of Bush and his cabi-
net members—the fact that Bush’s “war was not going well,” perhaps because he had
“invaded the wrong country”49—have horrifying consequences for individuals in the
wrongly invaded country and for Americans (especially American immigrants, such as
Roberto’s fictionalized family in “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden”). Moreover, the Bush
administration seems to intensify its mistakes by framing Americans as part of a binary.
To quote the historical Bush’s post-9/11 language, “You’re either with us or against us in
the fight against terror.”50 According to this post-9/11 national rhetoric, there remains no
space for American citizens to exist as ethical while laughing at or pointedly critiquing
an American government run by officials who may have questionable ethics, motives,
and characters. And there remains little opportunity for Americans to separate out fact
from fiction in the historical record, as Doctorow’s readers are invited to do in the novel.
Ultimately, Doctorow uses his novel to exercise his authorial political influence
on personal as well as national identity, echoing an idea that he put forth in “False Docu-
ments” when he explained that the political purpose of his historically oriented fiction
renders him a radical according to the measures of those in power. As Doctorow puts it,
“Wherever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are
routinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.”51 In Andrew’s Brain, Doctorow arguably
emerges as such an enemy of the state in that he attempts to facilitate among his readers
294  Studies in American Fiction

a rhetoric that counters the binaristic one propagated by Bush and his cabinet members
after 9/11. He suggests that forging connections between personal and national history
and between fact and fiction, as Andrew does and as readers might, can lead to potentially
socially responsible and productive ends when characters and readers choose to operate
beyond the limits of binaries. Echoing his discussion of “ordinary citizens” in “Child,
Dead, in the Rose Garden” (133), Doctorow showcases ways that “ordinary citizens”
can transcend the limits of that role. As Andrew explains after performing a symbolic
handstand in Bush’s Oval Office, “Really it was a triumph. I had for a moment risen out
of my characteristic humility, my ordinary citizenness, and in one upside-down gesture
achieved equity with these governors of my country.”52 This Andrew is very different
from the dutiful Andrew who had fed his daughter medicine until it killed her because a
pharmacist told him to. The Andrew of this moment in the novel opts to call out absurdity
with symbolic, absurd actions of his own. He turns the illogical actions of the American
government (which masquerade as logical) on their head as he turns himself on his head.
He becomes a “Holy Fool” who “mourns for his country”53—the sort of fool who ap-
pears to speak truths within the narrative framework of Boris Godunov, a Russian opera
by Modest Mussorgsky that Andrew references earlier in the novel. More to the point,
Andrew emerges as a truth-telling Holy Fool rather than a duped citizen who mourns
his personal losses to wholly unproductive ends. As a result, Andrew briefly becomes a
character who can create social change through civic action—action rooted in thinking
that deconstructs the binary notion that the American government is quintessentially
good and that terrorists are quintessentially evil.
By taking action, whether symbolic (like Andrew’s) or direct, ordinary American
readers are invited to reclaim the national American narrative of history—the story of
America and the national identity that this story produces. And by reclaiming this nar-
rative, they can rescue it from the absurd governmental post-9/11 forces that directed its
evolution. They might redeem the potentially apocalyptic narrative, which is doomed
to end badly (as many of the stories that Andrew tells end badly). Indeed, redemption
emerges as a theme for both Andrew and Doctorow in the novel’s final moments as
Andrew meditates on the ending of Twain’s “A Cat-Tale.” Andrew, recounting Twain’s
commitment to telling bedtime stories to his daughters, observes that when Twain’s
daughters “are grown they will remember this tale and laugh with love for their father,”
and that “this is his redemption.”54 In other words, Twain’s redemption, as Andrew sees
it, exists in memory and thus in the mind as it emerges out of or through the brain—a
reference to the mind-brain relationship in which Andrew shows such interest. As a failed
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  295

father who has killed one of his children by accident and given away another, Andrew
likely cannot find the sort of redemption in his children’s memory that he imagines Twain
can; he feels he cannot reenter Willa’s life to develop a meaningful and thereby memo-
rable relationship with her. He cannot reclaim or resuscitate his identity as a father. Yet
the opportunity for personal redemption and resuscitated identity that Andrew lacks is
available to the “ordinary citizens” who form the American nation. They can emerge as
socially responsible; they can avoid the sort of horrifying end that characterizes so many
of Andrew’s stories. They have the opportunity to reenter a relationship with political
power to produce a meaningful and memorable narrative of post-9/11 life and of their
nation—a narrative that can replace the (at best) absurd one represented in Andrew’s Brain
or the (at worst) corrupt one that defines America in “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden.”
To borrow Doctorow’s words from the conclusion of Lamentation 9/11, these citizens have
an opportunity to produce a revised and notably “consensual reality that inches forward
over generations to an enlightened forbearing relationship among human beings . . . and
a dream of truth.”55

Notes

1. See, for example, Matthew A. Henry, “Problematized Narratives: History as Fiction in E. L. Docto-
row’s Billy Bathgate,” Critique 39, no. 1 (1997): 32–40, 32; Stacey Olster, Reminiscence and Re-Creation
in Contemporary American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 9.
2. E. L. Doctorow, “False Documents,” E. L. Doctorow: Essays & Conversations, ed. Richard Trenner
(Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983), 16–27, 24.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. E. L. Doctorow, interview by Connie Doebele, C-SPAN, September 28, 2002, www.c-span.org/
video/?172907-3/author-interview.
5. “Doctorow Ruminates On How A ‘Brain’ Becomes A Mind,” interview by Scott Simon, NPR,
January 11, 2014, www.npr.org/2014/01/11/261450791/doctorow-ruminates-on-how-a-brain-
becomes-a-mind.
6. E. L. Doctorow, interview by Connie Doebele.
7. Lucy Bond, Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 73.
8. See, for example, Anita Shreve, A Wedding in December (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2005); Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (New York: Ecco, 2006); Lynne Sharon Schwartz,
The Writing on the Wall (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2006); Jay McInerney, The Good Life (New York:
Knopf, 2007); and Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Pantheon, 2008). For critical examination
of the tension between private and public in 9/11 novels, see, for example, Richard Gray, After
the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 65; Bond,
Frames of Memory, 18.
296  Studies in American Fiction

9. E. L. Doctorow, “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” Sweet Land Stories (New York: Random House,
2005), 133. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
10. “Finding Reason in an Age of Terror: Author Don DeLillo Surveys a Landscape Forever Changed
by Violence and Anxiety,” interview by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003, E1).
11. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 4.
12. Noam Chomsky, “Not Since the War of 1812,” in 9–11: Was There an Alternative, 2001 (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2011), 43).
13. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 73.
14. E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel, (New York: Plume, 1996). Daniel Isaacson, the protagonist of
The Book of Daniel, is a doctoral student at Columbia University investigating the execution of his
parents for espionage, and readers who read Doctorow’s text are in fact reading Daniel’s disserta-
tion.
15. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), 182.
16. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative,” PMLA 100, no. 1
(1985): 81–95, 84.
17. Hilary Mills, “Creators on Creating: E. L. Doctorow” (includes an interview with E. L. Doctorow),
Saturday Review, October 1980, 44.
18. E. L. Doctorow, “Introduction,” in Creationists: Selected Essays 1993–2006 (New York: Random
House, 2006), ix–xiii, xii.
19. Michael Wutz, “Literary Narrative and Information Culture: Garbage, Waste, and Residue in the
Work of E. L. Doctorow,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 3 (2003): 501–535, 520.
20. E.L. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain (New York: Random House, 2014), 6.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Ibid., 20.
23. Ibid., 196.
24. “E. L. Doctorow’s New Novel Blends Reality and Fiction,” interview by Barbara Chai, Wall Street
Journal, January 6, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270230393310457930470159832475
2).
25. Mark Twain, “A Cat-Tale,” in Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 2010), 76–84, 76.
26. K. Narayana Chandran, “And Thereby Hangs a Tale: Narrative Play in Mark Twain’s ‘A Cat-Tale,’”
in Mark Twain and Nineteenth Century American Literature, (Hyderabad, India: American Studies
Research Centre, 1993), 1–7, 4.
27 Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain, 52.
28 Chandran, “And Thereby Hangs a Tale,” 4.
29. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain, 94.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 199.
32. Ibid., 130.
 E. L. Doctorow and 9/11  297

33. Ibid.
34. “Finding Reason in an Age of Terror,” interview by Ulin, E1.
35. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s, December 2001, 34.
36. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain, 153.
37. Ibid., 196.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 140.
41. Ibid., 163.
42. Ibid., 173.
43. Ibid., 176
44. Ibid., 153.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 171.
47. Ibid., 163.
48. Ibid., 187.
49. Ibid., 174.
50. “You Are Either with Us or against Us,” CNN, November 6, 2001, edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/
gen.attack.on.terror/.
51. E. L. Doctorow, “False Documents,” E. L. Doctorow: Essays & Conversations, ed. Richard Trenner
(Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983), 16–27, 22.
52. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain, 190–91.
53. Ibid., 191.
54. Doctorow, Andrew’s Brain, 200.
55. E. L. Doctorow, Lamentation 9/11 (New York: Ruder-Finn Press, 2002), 122–23.