The Book of Daniel – E. L. Doctorow

Author:

It’s been reported that E. L. Doctorow tells his students, when it comes to writing historical fiction, “Do the least amount of research you can get away with, and no less.” At its best, the historical novel provides more insight than history and more pleasure than a novel; hewing close to the facts but disregarding them regularly for the sake of aesthetic and narrative pleasure, such fiction offers us not only a sense of what happened, but also an argument for what it might mean to us. A publishing insider and gifted critic, Doctorow brings a powerful self-consciousness about historical fiction to his own masterful efforts in the genre, including The Book of Daniel, Ragtime (1975), and Billy Bathgate (1989).

 

The Book of Daniel, Doctorow’s third novel, centers on the son of a Jewish couple who were convicted for treason and electrocuted by the U.S. government during the 1950s anti-Communist witch hunts. They’re not exactly Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—in Doctorow’s novel, they’re called Rochelle and Paul Isaacson, and they have a son and a daughter rather than the two boys the real Rosenbergs had—but they’re close. The novel relates the story of their arrest, trial, and execution through the eyes of their son, who is understandably disturbed by the world he’s grown up in—it’s not easy being a surviving member of “a notorious family.” When he’s not out sneering at the counterculture, Daniel spends his time at Columbia University’s Butler Library, procrastinating from his dissertation by reading up on the history of the capital punishments, such as knouting and burning at the stake, that preceded death by electrocution. In a fragmented and self-consciously postmodern narrative, Doctorow weaves in remarkable set pieces: a chilling scene from Paul Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York; a parody of a Bintel Brief letter to the Yiddish Forward; invocations of the psychedelic prophecies of the biblical book from which the novel takes its title; and learned mock-academic discourses on Disneyland, the history of Communism, and a dozen other subjects.

 

Beneath the raging surface of such virtuosity lies Doctorow’s deep concern for his characters and their suffering, as well as his broad interest in what happened to left-wing politics in the U.S. after WWII. The novel ends with Daniel’s leaving Butler library to join the Columbia University student protests of 1968. Though grim in its outlook and subject, the novel engages with history and eschews hopelessness: it shows the power of fiction to reconstruct, manipulate, and subvert history in the hopes of understanding it.