MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Doctorow We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 ANDREW’S BRAIN by E.L. Doctorow /2014/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow/ /2014/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow/#comments Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:45:44 +0000 /?p=23893 Book Quote:

“Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have— the ants, the bees— where the thinking is outsourced.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 9, 2014)

This was a wonderfully easy book to get into and enjoy; now I just need to figure out what it was about! Although there are no quotation marks, it seems to be a dialogue: a man whom we later identify as Andrew talking to what appears to be some kind of psychologist, someone who studies the mind. Andrew himself is a cognitive neuroscientist; he studies the physical brain. On one level, Doctorow seems to be examining the distinction between the two, as though Andrew’s mind were behaving in ways that Andrew’s brain alone cannot explain.

There are strange discrepancies in the narrative at first. Andrew refers to himself mainly in the first person, but occasionally in the third; is this perhaps his brain talking, rather than the man himself? He hears voices. He relates the same event in different time-frames and different ways, yet he insists he is not dreaming. At times, the narrative tricks reminded me of Paul Auster, though the more bizarre elements here do little more than ruffle the surface of an apparently straightforward story.

Andrew seems to leave a wake of disaster behind him. At the beginning, he tells of being at his wits’ end, giving his divorced first wife the baby he had with his late second wife because he cannot look after her alone. We will soon hear about the tragedy that led to the divorce. The tragedy of the second wife’s death will take over half the book to emerge, but we will get there through a glowing love story that is the greatest source of joy in Doctorow’s intriguing novel, and the place where Andrew comes most completely to life as an individual.

I won’t say much more about the plot. It is important, I think, that Doctorow does not at first tell us how long ago these events happened, who the psychologist is, or where Andrew is now. All these things will be revealed towards the end, as the book, now broken down into ever-shorter sections, impinges on real events in recent American history — but impinges upon them in increasingly unreal ways. There is an element of near-fantasy at the end, which makes me wonder whether Andrew is intended as a real person after all?

There is some evidence for this. One topic that interests Andrew is the question of “group brain” — the communal consciousness that gives meaning to a colony of ants, or enables a flock of birds to fly and wheel as one. He wonders if this applies to humans, too: if there is such a thing, for instance, as a “government brain,” or if a presidential election does not represent something more than a simple majority at the ballot box, but a kind of national wish-fulfillment? Doctorow has often used his novels to examine and critique specific periods in American history. At the end of this one, I was just beginning to think of Andrew less as the weirdly unreliable narrator of the first part, less even as the fortunate lover of the middle section, but perhaps simply as a symbol for the changes in the national psyche over the decade or so during which the main action takes place?

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 18 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: E.L. Doctorow
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
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]]> /2014/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow/feed/ 0 RAGTIME by E. L. Doctorow /2011/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/ /2011/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/#comments Sat, 30 Jul 2011 12:50:18 +0000 /?p=19533 Book Quote:

“Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 24, 2011)

E.L. Doctorow’s 1974 masterpiece, Ragtime, takes its name from the a style of music, the melodious offspring of blackface cakewalks and patriotic marches, that perfectly captures the optimism and energy of the America in the early 1900s. It’s aptly titled too, for Doctorow manages to capture the energy of the era, a time of hitherto unheard of growth and prosperity, a time when coal miners took on the capitalists for safer work conditions and fair pay, and won; a time when a single, socially- minded photographer, documenting immigrant ghettos, took pictures powerful enough to move a president and serve as evidence of the necessity of improved housing conditions for the poor; a time when American entrepreneurs amassed more wealth than some European monarchy, through little more than hard work and talent. However, it was also the era of Jim Crow legislation and the venomous prejudice that made it impossible for a black man to materially enjoy his success, say, by driving a shiny new Model T Ford – but more on that later.

Although too many people, unprotected by social safety nets or workplace regulations, lived and worked in squalor, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century brought with it a general sense of hope and optimism, and it’s the paradoxes of this period, the progressive enlightenment and conservative barbarism, the frosty rationality and fuzzy superstition, the fervent patriotism and homicidal anarchy, that E.L. Doctorow builds Ragtime around.

Set in New Rochelle, NY and New York City, the book centers on an upper-class family known only by their roles in relation to a young male observer: Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather. And while they could stand-in for any of a certain type of family – well-off, white, entrepreneurial – they are remarkable, in all their anonymity, for the ways in which they burst out of type, in spite of themselves: Father, a manufacturer of patriotic paraphernalia, tags along with his flags on Arctic expeditions, something of a hobbyist explorer; Mother, radically progressive without knowing it, befriends Sarah, the black mother of the illegitimate baby Mother finds buried in the garden, and ends up raising the black child as her own; Younger Brother builds bombs to aid a series of rebels after his heart is broken by the infamous Evelyn Nesbit, wife of the morphine-addicted sadist and millionaire, Harry Thaw. In what was billed as “The Crime of the Century,” Thaw famously blew off the face of Nesbit’s long-time lover, the architect, Stanford White, in the roof-top garden at Madison Square Gardens.

In fact, throughout the book, the whole family, not just Younger Brother, have connections of varying importance with historical figures: Mother serves Harry Houdini lemonade when his car breaks down in front of their house; a heartbroken Younger Brother takes to following Emma Goldman and her revolutionaries around; Father helps to end a standoff in J. Pierpont Morgan’s house. And while this anonymous family plays its bit role in history, cultural trends bring the major players together: J. Pierpont Morgan tries to interest Henry Ford in joining his secret society founded on Egyptian-flavoured occultism; Harry Houdini impresses a mistaken Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the inventor of a flying machine; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung happen upon Evelyn Nesbit at a street art stall devoted to silhouette art.

However, for all the optimism of the early 20th century, these were far from perfect times: racism was still rampant and institutionalized. Coalhouse Walker is a black musician doomed by his well-groomed confidence and articulate manner and the father of the baby Mother found in the garden. When Mother and Father take Sarah and the baby into their home, Coalhouse drives out from Harlem, every Sunday, his shiny red Model T Ford glinting through the streets of New Rochelle like a flickering flame. This is too much for the men of the Emerald Isle Engine, a volunteer fire brigade, and when Coalhouse fails to show them the deference they feel due, they destroy his car. After Sarah is killed in her misguided attempt to appeal to the federal government for help, Coalhouse’s sets out for revenge, bringing New Rochelle to its knees in terror.

Meticulously researched, this book alludes heavily to historical facts, however, Doctorow’s deft hand keeps the narrative from sagging under the weight of it all, and just as no historical account can ever be free of interpretation, Doctorow’s prose, however deceptively declarative, is steeped in judgment. For example:

“At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.”

As I read Ragtime an American flag billowed in the periphery of my mind’s eye like an animated icon, as if all the threads of the story were woven together to create one of Father’s flags. However, this wonderful exploration of early 20th-century America will appeal not only to history buffs, but to anyone interested in great fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 140 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 8, 2007)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: E. L. Doctorow
EXTRAS: Wikipedia on Ragtime
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: 

All the Time in the World

Homer and Langley

The March

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]]> /2011/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/feed/ 0 ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD by E. L. Doctorow /2011/all-the-time-in-the-world-by-e-l-doctorow/ /2011/all-the-time-in-the-world-by-e-l-doctorow/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:04:55 +0000 /?p=16900 Book Quote:

“I don’t belong here. I am outside this realm. If I were inside this realm, I wouldn’t feel this way.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 22, 2011)

E.L. Doctorow is without a doubt one of the most critically acclaimed authors publishing in America today. He has enthralled us with Ragtime, mesmerized us with Homer & Langley, snapped us to attention with The March, and provoked us to think outside of the box with The Book of Daniel.

But even though I’ve periodically read his short stories in The New Yorker, I never quite viewed him as a “short story writer.” Well, after finishing All The Time in the World, that perception has definitely changed.

Stylistically, Doctorow has been described as a nomad, leaping across styles and genres and this collection is no exception. The reader must dig hard to discover a thread that connects these disparate stories, finally deferring to Doctorow’s own judgment as defined in the preface, “I see there is no Winesburg here to be mined for humanity… What may unify them is the thematic segregation of their protagonists. The scale of a story causes it to home in on people who, for one reason or another, are distinct from their surroundings – people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.”

Take these stories for example: an affluent lawyer at the end of an ordinary workday decides to become an observer of his own life, hiding within feet of his wife and twin daughters. As he pares his life down to the bare essentials, it is only the thrill of competition that brings him back once again.

A husband and wife – who have elevated verbal sparring to a fine art – see their relationship exposed in bare relief when a homeless poet who once lived in their home enters their life.

A young immigrant, with aspirations to produce films, takes a dishwasher’s job in a criminal enterprise, and agrees to marry the top honcho’s beautiful niece for money. Yet this mercenary decision entangles him in a greater emotional involvement than he ever expected.

A teenage boy named Jack – the writer in the family – is prevailed upon by an aunt to write letters to his ancient grandmother in the voice of his recently deceased father…until he comes face to face with his father’s real dream of life.

And, in the eponymous final story, an urban citizen, out for a typical morning run, no longer recognizes his city and suspects that a nefarious Program has put him there without his consent.

These wide-ranging pieces span time, American geography, and social strata: they’re set in New York City, a nameless but instantly recognized suburbia, the deep south, the Midwest. They move from the late nineteenth century to a moment in the future. They are populated with disenchanted lawyer, a down-on-her-luck teenager, an increasingly cynical priest, even a son of a serial murderer. They sing with tension, poignancy, and authenticity. And they evoke the past, present and future in ways that are both mysterious and familiar.

In short, this is yet the latest indication that E.L. Doctorow is an author not only for our times, but for all time. The book contains six memorable stories that have never appeared in book form combined with a selection of beloved Doctorow classics.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 10 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (March 22, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: E.L. Doctorow
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> /2011/all-the-time-in-the-world-by-e-l-doctorow/feed/ 0 HOMER & LANGLEY by E. L. Doctorow /2010/homer-langley-by-e-l-doctorow/ /2010/homer-langley-by-e-l-doctorow/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:08:47 +0000 /?p=11640 Book Quote:

“There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (SEP 6, 2010)

As one reads Homer & Langley and is swept along on its strange tide, one tries to raise one’s head intermittently to admire the craft. But that craft is, like the shoes made by the elves in story, so seamless, so perfect, that it’s hard to grasp until one is deposited on the other shore and left to linger for a while.

The novel uses the theme of the real-life case of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, who lived on 5th Avenue in New York from the 1880s to 1947. A case of great notoriety, the brothers (suffering from extreme compulsive hoarding disorder) effectively mewed themselves up within their house. Over the decades this filled with newspapers, collections of mainly non-functional items, and garbage. They disassociated themselves from the outside world to the extent that their electricity and water supplies were cut off – a situation they did not attempt to rectify. After their death (caused directly by the accumulated items within the house), over 100 tons of hoarded rubbish were removed from the house.

The case is of such notoriety that dramatisations and fictionalisations of it abound. Novels include Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper (1954) and Franz Lidz’s 2003 Ghostly Men (a history of the brothers). Stephen King used details from the story in Salem’s Lot (1975). Movies either based on or inspired partially by the story include “Unstrung Heroes” (1995), a movie based on Ghostly Men. References to the case crop up in numerous TV serials, and at least six plays have been based directly or loosely on the story. It is so well documented there is little point in listing them all again here. Suffice it to say, the case is well-known.

Unlike the bulk of writing pertaining to this case, Doctorow does not focus on the squalor and scandal of the situation: those aspects which are most titillating to the popular media and the public. The first-person narrator, Homer (“I’m Homer, the blind brother”) recounts the past years of their life within the house with a diction so gentle, so unassuming, thoughtful and musical that it is well into the narrative before we start to suspect things are seriously amiss. The novel pretty much comments on itself when Homer’s “Muse” Jacqueline (the French reporter) tells him:

“There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. (…) You think a word and you can hear its sound. (…) words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

The sound of Homer & Langley is of a soft voice by a fireside, never too fast or too loud, and always considerate of the listener. The strange narrative is gripping not because of drastic happenings or fast action, but because one doesn’t want to get up from that fireside, or stop listening to the voice.

This is not to ignore the laconic humour that pervades most of the book. The tone is so deferential and quiet that quirky tongue-in-cheek moments creep up on us unexpectedly. It’s ambiguous, though, as to how much self-awareness Homer has. As to whose tongue is in their cheek, Homer’s or Doctorow’s, is not always entirely clear.

Despite its genteel tone and historical setting, the impression Homer & Langley gives by the end of the narrative is that it has more in common with typically post-apocalyptic settings and themes than with fin-de-siecle writing, the latter of which it more closely resembles superficially. Why?

One of its main themes is consumerism. Langley’s grand “Theory of Replacements” which leads to the disastrous accumulation of junk inside the house states that “everything is replaced.” Children are replacements for their parents, current events are merely a cycle of typecasts which endlessly repeat each other: as one is forgotten, another immediately takes its place. Langley, however, is a mass of contradictions. Despite his cherished theory, none of the myriad of items he brings into his own house are ever “replaced” – they merely get buried. The brothers cannot find anything useful they know they have (such as candles in a black-out) because they have long-since been covered in other items.

Langley’s fatalistic view is that as humanity is such a polluter and exploiter, the sooner it blows itself up the better, as it will make way for some other more worthwhile species. This tends to be the conclusion that novels of apocalyptic devastation often pose, and generally stems (as in this case) from a direct disgust with consumerism and bureaucratised waste. Langley, however, is also the ultimate consumer: always acquiring, never passing anything on. It is in this way that Langley’s own theory of greed bringing about the demise of mankind is fulfilled in miniature within his own house, when he is finally overwhelmed by his own falling booby-trap of junk.

Langley’s more confrontational nature in response to the pressures of the modern is the perfect foil, however, to what is possibly the main focus: the world of Homer, the narrator. What seems at first to be a gentle narration of a stoic, romantic individual turns slowly towards us until we finally see it for what it is: a comment on the process of growing old. At this point, it is useful to look at which aspects of this story the author has decided to change.

Most pointedly, he has made Homer blind at a much younger age than in reality. Homer Collyer actually lost his sight at the age of 52, not 14 as in the novel. By depriving the character of visual input at this age, Doctorow effectively chrysalises part of his psyche into the innocence of a sheltered pubescent boy, to highlight his lack of culpability for the famous squalor surrounding him. It emphasises his idealism and romanticism. Another significant detail which has been altered is that it was actually Langley who was the musician, not Homer. Homer, on the other hand, was the one with law skills, not Langley as in the book. The allocation of all “sharper” capabilities like law to Langley, and the more sensitive ones to Homer again help to accentuate his romantic innocence.

So why is it so important that Homer is not culpable? His role is to observe the progress of time and not to alter it – and once again, here facts have been adjusted dramatically to accentuate the effect. In the novel, the brothers live on in their house well into the 1970s, possibly the 80s (making them almost a century old), when in fact they both died in 1947. Doctorow has extended their lives by decades to emphasise the difference between the life they knew as children and the situation they find themselves at the end of it. As boys they rode in horse-drawn carriages and the streets had the organic smell of manure and leather. By the end Homer is nearly knocked down by a passing car, the air is filled with exhaust fumes and the Cold War creates global fear.

The passage of time brings changes, which the brothers try to interpret in their own way. People come in and out of the house; lives are touched briefly, but always revert to the status of the two of them, together in their isolation. And as the junk accumulates, the isolation increases.

Because Homer is blind, he relies on his other senses to interpret the world. He is particularly proud of his sense of hearing, and Langley supports this by describing him as bat-like. Homer navigates by hearing the differences in sound patterns as objects are shifted around the room: as he puts it, by the volume of air they displace. “I feel shapes as they push the air away, or I feel the heat from things, you can turn me around till I’m dizzy, but I can still tell where the air is filled in with something solid.”

Homer’s ability to navigate the world around him decreases incrementally. As a boy, still fully sighted, he says of himself: “I was in the fullness of my senses, then.” Then he loses his sight, but with his fine hearing and his stoical acceptance he does not feel it to be too much of an impediment. As the years progress he realises more and more how much his lack of sight bars him from a normal family life, until towards the end of the novel he also loses his hearing and the world of utter isolation closes in with a totality that is unbearable.

Meanwhile, the diminishment of visual powers has been firmly tied to memory. He narrates: “My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognised.” While Homer himself increasingly relies on memories, those very memories are described as having a finite number of uses. Each time a memory is used (remembered), it loses a little of its gloss, its immediacy, until the edges are vague and features are generalised.

As the potency of input sense capacity goes down and the material store of sustaining memories is used up, the house around him increases its clutter – a factor which directly makes his life difficult as he cannot navigate round the objects as he used to do. There is too much junk in the way, he cannot feel the displaced air as he did previously. The junk which obscures useful items like candles is the material equivalent of the “memory junk” that accumulates as a person ages, and itself forms a barrier between them and the outside world: in this case made literal by the absolute barricading of the front door so that all ingress and egress is barred.

Doctorow manages the tempo of the isolation carefully. The real-life brothers’ major utilities were disconnected in 1928, nearly two decades before their deaths, but the account of this in the book comes very near the end. The long-drawn-out downwards trend (masked to Homer partially by his own volition, partially by his lack of sensory input) continues steadily until, as in the decay of an aged body, things suddenly start to fall apart in good earnest. “Langley and I (…) had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the same idea.”

In the latter stages, the two inseparable brothers are connected only by a small tunnel through the debris, and as Homer can neither hear nor see his brother he says again of him, as for his parents: “I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, of is falling away in space. (…) It is almost as if the reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.”

Diminishment of attachment to the living world experienced by so many millions of elderly people in our increasingly ageing society is manifested in concrete form by the vehicle of the Collyer brothers’ story. Homer and Langley is a small and mellifluous piece which leaves a haunting, reverberating note of sadness of ageing and regret at the transience of things, and is not easily forgotten.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 190 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER: Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: E.L. Doctorow
EXTRAS:
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