E. L. Doctorow 'The Book of Daniel'

The biblical Daniel not only interpreted the dreams of the monarch Nebuchadnezzar, but reimagined and reconstituted those dreams Nebuchadnezzar had forgotten, so that no detail of the enigmatic story they comprised would escape analysis. It is the task of E. L. Doctorow's Daniel, as a son of the executed Isaacsons (freely interpreted versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) to piece together the story of his parents' trial and appeals process and the various political and cultural myths which surrounded it, together with his memories of life with them in the Bronx in the forties, memories of their friends, political actions, marital and family life, in an effort to discover the truth about their guilt or innocence and so lay a foundation for what continues to elude him: a sense of his own identity. 'The Book of Daniel' is a complex and layered work which pursues its quarry through aspects of fact and fiction, through public and private domains, until it comes to reference the act of writing itself, that is, the writing of 'Daniel's Book', as perhaps the only knowable phenomenon in what is revealed to be an enormously unstable, always elusive, and thoroughly relative truth. Daniel is unable to assemble a unified picture, but he does in a post-modern sort of way come to reject the idea that a unified picture is anything other than an illusion, possibly a dangerous one, since his parents and his sister perish as a result of their cleaving too tightly to their certainties. When his sister Susan says to him They're still fucking us. Good-bye, Daniel. You get the picture, she is already in a mental home after trying to commit suicide; her illusions have cycled her through stages of hysterical affiliation, starting with a belief in God when she was small, through experiments with sex and drugs to, finally (and fatally), the radical politics (sixties-style) she believes will help her rehabilitate her parents, her world, and herself. Daniel, on the other hand, cannot decide whether she has said "good-bye" or "good boy". There are several places in the book where Daniel's decision to write his story this way or that way are considered. We are party to his fragmented thought processes, his to-do lists, his doubts and questions, his wondering how to spell the word 'commit'. Paragraphs are broken, abandoned, picked up mid-sentence. In one intriguing moment, the words "violin spiders" appear suddenly at the top of the page, for no apparent reason. I'm still wondering about that. The story switches backwards and forwards in time, there are sudden shifts in perspective from first to third-person, and long, developed narrative segments reminiscent of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow interspersed with political and historical exposition ranging from descriptions of Tsarist Russia to Bikini Atoll to Anaheim. What makes the book a great one (it was hailed as "a masterpiece" by the Guardian when it came out in 1971) is Doctorow's ability to keep this number of balls in the air without stumbling. The sightlines of his fragmented story arcs dip and feint and weave through one another in such a way that a coherent picture emerges - not the picture Daniel was looking for, not 'the answer' a desperate mind craves - but a fantastically complex and mobile collage in which it is possible to recognize the pattern of lives lived in time and in society.

Doctorow takes a not-altogether dim view of the radical left, despite his relativist proclivities. His portraits of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are subtle in details, nuanced, real - not exactly warm, though Rochelle emerges as a hero of sorts, but deeply human. Their struggle is contextualized, made comprehensible, and where their rigid beliefs betray them, we feel more sympathy than contempt. Which is to say, Doctorow handles the subject with enough sensitivity to accomodate a readerly bias toward the left, despite his rejection of radical absolutism. It is similar in this way to Hari Kunzru's 2007 novel 'My Revolutions': the characters are seen to be misguided, but their humanity is never abandoned, and so it is possible to approach them from different perspectives. Doctorow's Daniel is, if anything, more likely to alienate the reader's sympathies than his dyed-in-the-wool communist relatives, because he is cruel, disconnected, and frankly misogynistic. I am still undecided as to where to pin the blame for phrases such as "shoving large cocks into everyone's mother", "she obviously had a pair", and "I remember the hair around her slit", not to mention the cigarette-lighter-in-the-anus scene; some of these ugly phrases seem dangerously close to authorial, though I believe the intention generally is to attribute their spirit to Daniel's moral disturbance, which is ultimately contained (just) within his narrative. But do we really need to know about the "sour smell of excrement" which rises from Daniel's wife's spread buttocks? Doctorow walks a pretty fine line in this department. Fortunately he proves himself fairly adept at walking fine lines through other sorts of murky human territory as well, through the morally questionable aspects of the lecherous traitor Mindish and his controlling, middle-class daughter Linda, for example. His characters aren't idealized, to say the least. But they are recognizable, if we are honest. Doctorow is a cool-eyed sort of observer, who aims for the unclassifiable in us, no matter who we are or what we may or may not have done, and his refusal to deliver the answers we crave despite ourselves is curiously satisfying.