In The Book of Daniel, the son of the Communists obeys the dictates of his trauma by conducting a miniature, mobile electrocution of his own, burning his Volvo’s electric lighter into his wife’s buttocks as they drive along the Massachusetts Turnpike, in convoy with his adoptive parents, in the rain. In Billy Bathgate, that bright-eyed, juggling boy soon finds himself in the Boss’s Packard, being chauffeured in a way that shows the difference ‘between driving a car and running it with the authority of a professional’. In World’s Fair, a youngster hurries along in the track of the Hindenburg as it passes whisperingly overhead. In Loon Lake, a runaway is woken by a passing train and sets off doggedly in pursuit. These lines of life have a strange affinity with the routes taken by means of mechanised transport. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? ![]() The trajectories of historical figures can – correspondingly – be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Of course (in Billy Bathgate) a bright-eyed boy juggling on street corners in the Bronx in the 1930s is going to be noticed by the passing gangster boss Dutch Schultz and get drawn into his orbit of course (in The Book of Daniel) the son of a Communist couple sent to the electric chair for espionage – like the Rosenbergs in 1953 – will grow up troubled and sadistic, have an ambivalent relationship to the New Left, and struggle to assert his parents’ innocence. In the work of Dos Passos, historical circumstances tend to stifle human potential in DeLillo they tend to gasify into all-permeating media representations but in Doctorow they create a network of defining possibilities along which characters can advance. But another impression it gives is that the environment being explored comes ready structured. ![]() For a reader, too, the feeling of being searchingly led forward is one of the pleasures offered by his fiction. Doctorow has spoken of the adventure of his process of composition, of the excitement of not knowing where he is going to end up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |