“t’s like driving a car at night,” he told the Paris Review in 1986, describing what it was like for him to work on a novel: “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”Īt the same time, he also insisted, intuition alone was not enough. This was true, as well, of his process, which required feeling out the shape, the textures, of a story he never knew where he was going when he began. … Yes, I was bar mitzvahed, but my grandfather gave me a copy of Tom Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason.’ So it’s always been that way with me, that nothing dogmatic was stamped on my soul.”Īs a result, perhaps, he became a highly intuitive writer, bound less by labels - political writer, historical writer, Jewish writer - than simultaneously inside and outside these categories all at once. He traced this sensibility to his Depression-era upbringing in the Bronx, where, he said, his household was “split down the middle between the religious impulse and the irreligious impulse. “A novelist,” he said simply, “partakes of many identities.” He was deeply influenced by the Transcendentalists, taking the title of his 2003 essay collection “Reporting the Universe” from Emerson and recasting Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield” into a memorable short fiction of his own. His finest novel, I think, remains 2000’s “City of God,” which brought together subjects as diverse as the Holocaust, theology, quantum physics and the inexplicability of love to explore nothing less than the nature of reality and the validity (or lack thereof) of faith.ĭoctorow could work that way. But Doctorow was equally at ease with contemporary characters and their conundrums. It also led to the author being considered a historical novelist, which both was and wasn’t the case.Ĭertainly, much of his writing dealt with the past: “Billy Bathgate” and “World’s Fair,” set in the Bronx of the 1930s “The Waterworks,” a tale of 19th century New York. “Ragtime” was Doctorow’s breakthrough book, a bestseller and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, it was made into a film in 1981. Whether the character is publicly known or not publicly known, you’re doing the same thing.” You’re doing what a painter does when he paints a portrait.
“When you use a historical character like Sherman,” he explained, “it’s your Sherman. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march as a kind of native Grand Guignol. In “The March” (2005) - his last great novel - he reimagined Gen. In “Ragtime” (1975), he crafted a big American novel inspired by John Dos Passos, juxtaposing historical figures such as Emma Goldman, Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit with characters of his own creation to tell a story of the United States at the turn of the last century, a nation of possibility on the one hand and scabrous inequality on the other.
Each book was a different experience, with its own set of challenges and expectations. This quality of looking beyond himself, of seeking stories that were broader than personal testimony, was what set Doctorow apart.
It wasn’t until I realized that Daniel should write the book, that it should be his voice rather than mine, that it began to work.” In ‘The Book of Daniel,’ I wrote 150 pages and threw them away, they were so bad. I don’t ever want to hear my own voice it’s one of the worst things that can happen. “I think there’s a kind of ventriloqual thing that goes on when I write. “Every book has its own voice,” the author told me in 2006.
That, in his case, history was both personal and collective made him a quintessential Doctorow character.
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His first novel, “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), written while he was a reader for a movie company, took the conventions of the western and upended them, highlighting the inevitability of evil, or at least of chaos, and our weakness or indecision when faced with it.īut it was only with the publication of his third novel, “The Book of Daniel” (1971), that Doctorow truly found his métier, blending history and imagination to tell the story of Daniel Lewin, adult son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, a couple modeled on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and, like them, executed at the height of the Cold War.ĭaniel is a tormented character, adrift amidst the radicalism of the 1960s, on the run from history. More than Philip Roth or John Updike, more even than Norman Mailer, Doctorow created fiction that existed at the intersection of American myth and hypocrisy. Doctorow, who died Tuesday of complications from lung cancer at 84, was perhaps the most American novelist of his generation.