![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As to the topical descriptions, they appear to be accurate enough to satisfy an exacting student of Americana. Like Houdini’s audiences, I am made to enjoy being fooled. I, for one, although no friend of that aberration, am willing to forgive any historical novelist who makes his flights from historical fact as funny and pertinent as Doctorow makes his. “This mixture of fact and fiction may confuse or mislead the unwary or historically uninformed reader, and it suggests a projection onto the past of the suspect techniques of the New Journalism. It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction. –Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, June 7, 1971 The kingdom is divided, but there is no judgment, no handwriting on the wall.” The last and greatest irony is that the God of the Bible-of the original Book of Daniel-the God who, according to Daniel Lewin’s kid sister, ‘gets people,’ ‘takes care of them,’ ‘lays on his monumental justice,’ has abdicated his throne. We weep because the bridge between reality and fiction is still intact, because we are reminded that no one, not even this latter-day prophet and dream-interpreter, can explain why these people died. And the horror of it is that it brings no release, no pity and fear, no Greek purgation. But when the time comes for the execution, Doctorow-Daniel does not hold back (‘I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution.I will show you that I can do the electrocution.’)Īnd he does. Doctorow scrupulously avoids sentiment either cheap or expensive not a small part of the novel’s fascination lies in the puzzles of its obliquities. ![]() One doesn’t read the novel on the crest of emotion Mr. “…there are no schematic answers in The Book of Daniel. He freely acknowledges the looming presence of the Rosenberg Case by building a high-tension bridge between reality and fiction. Doctorow has turned such liabilities into assets. “Supposedly working on his doctoral thesis, Daniel instead produces notes toward an autobiographical novel about his Old-Left parents, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who in the early 1950’s were electrocuted for passing atom-bomb secrets to the Russians … One contemplates most novels based on controversial public happenings with a sinking heart: fictionalization tends to trivialize such events: the public record weighs like sandbags on the imagination. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us. In a career that lasted over fifty years Doctorow won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction, as well as numerous other accolades.īelow, we look back on a selection of classic reviews of some of Doctorow’s most famous novels-from 1971’s The Book of Daniel (loosely based on the lives, trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), to 2005’s The March (a multi-perspective recounting of Sherman’s March to the Sea). Perhaps John Updike put it best when he characterized Doctorow as “a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.” Considered one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century, Doctorow, who died in 2015, was known for his imaginative manipulation of popular genres, use of unconventional narrative forms, and for placing fictional characters and events within recognizable historical contexts. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ![]()
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