What's stranger? A pack of young Bohemians hopping between cities and orgies? A writer and his Samoan attorney heading for Las Vegas for a week of psychedelia? Or a writer and an elderly pathologist rolling through the countryside with Einstein's brain?
The cross-country journey often yields bizarre episodes, but none is as bizarre as the newest member of this genre.
"Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain" (Dial Press, $18.95) by journalist Michael Paterniti documents the strange journey, in which Paterniti chauffeurs Dr. Thomas Harvey — the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein — from Titusville, N.J., to Berkeley, Calif., to meet Einstein's granddaughter, Evelyn.
The twist, however, is that Harvey has some extra baggage — a duffel bag containing Einstein's brain.
The nonfiction work is Paterniti's first book, developed from a Harper's Magazine article, for which Paterniti won a National Magazine Award for feature writing in 1998.
Harvey has pointed out error in Paterniti's account of events. However the license that Paterniti takes with reality helps to capture the reader.
Paterniti intertwines three stories — Einstein's, Harvey's and his own — and though Einstein's biography raises awe and Harvey's tale sparks curiosity, the most captivating story is Paterniti's own. Paterniti's journey is an internal search for answers. Is he in love with his girlfriend back in Maine? Was his career choice the right one? What stands next for him in this lonely world?
And, the most persistent question, should he sneak a peak at the brain when Harvey's back is turned?
While Einstein lived, his brain planted the seeds for television, computers and the atomic bomb. And on this journey, it serves another purpose — to help Paterniti answer his own questions about himself.
Einstein explained the complex theory of relativity like this: "An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour." In the same way, Paterniti's brain accentuates the time away from his girlfriend, causing moments when Paterniti struggles to find the words to express what he feels.
Whereas these moments pull the reader into the story, however, Paterniti's obsession with the brain often pushes the reader away. The book seems to stall on the novelty of the precious cargo, just as its characters become apparently stalled in Kansas.
Paterniti battles throughout the book with the urge to reveal his secret. He fights to keep himself from screaming, "We have Einstein's brain in the trunk!" each time they pass a drive-thru window, and finally blabs the truth to a hotel clerk in Dodge City, Kan., who responds with indifference.
After spilling the beans once, Paterniti blurts the secret to a pair of Scientologist carpet cleaners, an elderly couple in a Vegas minstrel lounge, a group of Wisconsin fraternity brothers, a balding gas station attendant, a Korean blackjack dealer and a blonde cocktail waitress — for which he gets thrown from a casino.
Then, halfway through Kansas and 122 pages into the book, Paterniti finally gives in and asks Harvey, "What are the odds I can have a look at that brain?"
Harvey changes the subject with an extended, "Way-ell," and the reader is off again, flying through the plains next to the zipped duffel bag in the Buick's passenger seat — Paterniti's desire not yet fulfilled.
The anticipation for Paterniti's encounter with the brain heats up for nearly 200 pages before boiling over when Paterniti gets a remarkably anticlimactic glimpse of the object of his obsession. Paterniti needs to employ no secret-agent smoothness or con-man duplicity in stealing a peek at the brain, but rather is shown it at last while in the Buick's backseat with Evelyn Einstein.
When the two finally see the brain, it's not a whole brain at all, but chopped pieces encased in wax and floating in a jar of yellow liquid. As Paterniti comments, "We hold them up like jewelers, marveling at how they seem less like a brain than — what? — some kind of snack food, some kind of energy chunk for genius triathletes . . . holding Einstein's brain, I'd somehow imagine eating it."
It's this description, these metaphors, that bring the reader along with Paterniti to the Buick's back seat, to see the brain over his and Einstein's shoulders. Paterniti's prowess at painting a picture with words — which won him the National Magazine Award — is evident in scenes like this throughout the book.
Paterniti spins a tapestry in "Driving Mr. Albert" that, like Einstein's brain, is superficially bizarre but reveals deeper secrets after a closer examination.
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