E.L. Doctorow

Young Edgar learned the persuasive power of fiction at an early age. In a story he often told, in the late 1940s, he fulfilled an assignment in a journalism class at the Bronx High School of Science by writing a profile of Carl, the stage doorman at Carnegie Hall, filling it with such persuasive and poignant details that his teacher wanted to run it in the school newspaper. When it was time for a photographer to take the man’s picture, however, Edgar had to confess that there was no Carl the doorman; Carl was an invention.
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Mr. Doctorow’s final novel, “Andrew’s Brain” (2014), was written as a confessional monologue by a brilliant and deluded cognitive scientist whose gift for dissembling is attributed to the nature of the mind and the impossibility of burrowing to the truth with the tools of thought and speech.

“Pretending is the brain’s work,” Andrew explains. “It’s what it does.”

In “Andrew’s Brain,” Mr. Doctorow created perhaps his most inscrutable character — a narrator who recognizes the futility of narration.

Mr. Doctorow could be inscrutable himself. In writing a novel, he once said, it was his technique to stand at a remove, to invent a voice and let the voice speak, “to create the artist and let the artist do the work.”