Einstein is my copilot

Michael Paterniti's road trip

by David Valdes Greenwood

ON THE ROAD: Paterniti clearly recognizes the ability of the human experience to far surpass the weirdness of fictional worlds.

"THIS IS TOM HARVEY, GRANDMA. YOU KNOW, MY FRIEND WHO HAS EINSTEIN'S BRAIN." A line like this, so perfectly deadpan, and so utterly implausible, could only come from one place: real life. Author Michael Paterniti clearly recognizes the ability of the human experience to far surpass the weirdness of fictional worlds; he captures a particularly American slice -- well, chunks, actually -- of that strange reality in Driving Mr. Albert, his first book. Originally appearing in abbreviated form as an award-winning Harper's magazine article in 1998, the slim book chronicles the author's cross-country road trip with Harvey, the doctor who -- called in as the substitute pathologist for Albert Einstein's autopsy -- removed and kept the brain, which rides shotgun on the trip, swirling about in a Tupperware container.

What could be just an extended joke -- and is often quite funny -- becomes much more meditative in Paterniti's hands. He's on the New Jersey-to-California excursion because he has entered a funk that is poisoning his relationship with his girlfriend, Sara, and a quest (in this case, bringing the brain to Einstein's granddaughter) seems like the perfect antidote. But his Buick Skylark is filled with the memory of other journeys: Einstein's brilliant career which nonetheless led to loneliness and Harvey's erratic personal life which spanned three marriages and the whole continent. Though their paths rarely crossed in life, there is clear overlap in Einstein and Harvey's emotional histories: two men losing at love, never able to be fully present in their romantic lives. Their losses serve as warnings for Paterniti.

But long before Paterniti can see this, he is fascinated with the urban legends that attend Harvey and his infamous subject. Though the book is full of concise and witty descriptions of Einstein's life ("tweedling into the world's most hallowed halls in a bemused state of sockless dishevelment"), and it does provide a rounder portrait of the physicist than many readers have been exposed to, it is Harvey who comes to life most colorfully. Because he is flesh and blood to the author, he is much more alive for the reader: we see him, donning a green beret at 85, eager for a trip that will be his "last great tea-and-bongo rally"; we feel for him when he stands awkwardly on the doorstep of wife number two, unsure whether a goodnight kiss is in order after all these years. And, despite a half century of guarding it, his precocious treatment of the brain confounds our expectations.

Harvey parcels out sections to other researchers, seemingly at whim, so that Einstein's gray matter now graces the slide files and sample jars of labs in Germany, Venezuela, China, and Japan. (The eyes are in Philly, but that's another story.) Though samples are given away for study only, Harvey tends to bestow peeks at the remainder upon people he especially likes -- not initially including Paterniti, whom Harvey saw as a chauffeur, much to the author's chagrin. Perhaps this is because the doctor could sense the author's journalistic side would want more than a quick glance, that he might even want, say, a quick feel. As it is, his descriptions -- variously likening it to chicken meat in broth, snack food, phlegm, and a communion wafer -- make for an occasionally unsettling read in which gross-out humor gets mixed up with food imagery in hilariously stomach-churning ways.

Famous brains as a travel companion (let alone snack) seems a little less crazy once you meet the other people wandering the highways and back roads of America. Paterniti has included a funhouse catalogue of our nation's eccentrics in this story: cult deprogrammers and televangelists, Scientologist carpet cleaners and paranoid hotel clerks. Though he even squeezes in a story about a trip to Japan, where a karaoke bar provides an epiphany, his eyes are focused on the country that Einstein adopted late in life, and he wholeheartedly embraces the Midwestern goodness at its core, writing with exclamatory passion, "America is built on its pancake houses!"

That Paterniti can be brought to fullness of joy by pancakes suggests how emotionally vulnerable he is at the beginning of this trip and how profoundly this crossing will affect him. When he explains Einstein's theory of relativity, we see that Paterniti really just wants time to collapse back on itself so that he can right things with the absent Sara, who is as truly a passenger in the Skylark as the men. Indeed, this narrative is romantic in the best sense of the word, with a passionate mortal drawing moral lessons from the cosmos. Much like Paterniti's description of Einstein's work, this witty and poignant blend of "twentieth-century skepticism with nineteenth-century romanticism offers a different kind of hope."

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net..