Author: Diane Wald
Jack is dead. His famous brain has turned on him. After struggling with the slow decline brought about by an inoperable brain tumor Jack dies alone in his house, surrounded by ghosts and memories. Now, stuck somewhere beyond life, he is ready to look back over everything, to tell his story, and tease out if it had any meaning.
My Famous Brain is a strange book, being told from the prospective of a dead man, yet lilting with a certain kind of vagueness that denotes those who are alive and living in the unknowability of the moment. It’s certainly a depressing book, and Jack’s afterlife is not one filled with either hope or meaning. Jack does not believe in God, never did, and despite being dead, he remains oddly stoic. He has no curiosity about where he is and how he is sometimes able to see into moments that happened after his death. The only thing he cares to do is look over his story and the one final love that defined his life.
It’s this focus, this looking back and obsession with his brief near-end-of-life affair, that weakens the overall story. We expect a dead man talking to be filled with some sort of wisdom or at least some general curiosity about his afterlife and what, if anything, comes next. The nihilism of Jack’s continued insistence on nothingness and his obsession with an ultimately disappointing life bring the story down. It’s ultimately a life-means-nothing-and-then-you-die modern fairytale and for me, those never work. They are so illogical and despite all the pretty prose, these types of stories are ultimately and unnecessarily depressing.
Nevertheless, My Famous Brain is an intriguing story, despite my problems with Wald’s take on her dead character’s unchanging opinions on life. For most of the story, Jack is alive. He was born brilliant and we expect that he will have a fantastic life. So it’s a bit surprising that Jack’s clever brain never lead him to develop any new inventions or breakthroughs. It didn’t save him from the normal pitfalls of an average life: a regular job (he is a professor), a bad boss, and a failing marriage. Jack gets focused on the minutia of life, and as part of that, he teams up with another academic to take down the head of the department, a smarmy man named Wally Mussel. This all goes incredibly wrong, of course, and along the way Jack has a disastrous affair. He ends up divorced and alone, alienated from his children, and yet his life’s regrets from beyond the grave have nothing to do with being a failed family man or even leaving his great brain mostly unused.
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As Jack deals with the secret knowledge of his inoperable brain tumor, he has one final love affair: the one that will define his afterlife. Eliza is a young college student, already in a relationship, but she has no problem with two romances at once, and Jack finds himself drawn to her. He is beyond physical satisfaction at this point (that being a part of the brain tumor’s relentless progression), but instead he finds a soul mate. His glimpses from beyond the grave inevitably capture Eliza later in life, proving that their love was something beyond average.
It’s all a sleeper sort of story and, admittedly, I didn’t find Jack an especially sympathetic character. He is mostly selfish, with a few notable exceptions. Yet, despite all his flaws, and the heartbreak he leaves behind, including the rarely talked about but awful job he did as a father, there is still something about him that makes us want to follow his journey. Part of this is the way the story is told. It’s not an especially surprising or high-action tale, but it is the very believable story of a life that should have been extraordinary and wasn’t. Oddly enough, I found myself enjoying it and curious to see not only how Jack’s brain tumor progressed, but how his oddly disappointing life unraveled and how he thought and felt about it along the way.
My Famous Brain is a sedate, sleeper story, but it is nevertheless engrossing in its own way. It made me want to keep reading, and while I shook my head at most of Jack’s choices, I wanted to follow his journey to its bitter end. I enjoyed reading it, even though Jack’s vapid after life destroys the ultimate poignancy and breaks the realism.
– Frances Carden
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