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A review by bucket
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
4.0
I really enjoyed the premise here - that Daniel is procrastinating on his dissertation and what we're reading is what he is writing instead. It's clear that he's reliving his and his sister's childhood because it's the only thing he can write while his sister is fading. He unconsciously switches from 3rd person to 1st in his writing and he holds places for vignettes and scenes he wants to add later. He also gets a little meta about the reader, especially when discussing things that make him look bad or weak, and this strikes me as pretty cutting edge in when Doctorow published the book in 1971.
Daniel is struggling to come to terms with not knowing the truth about what his parents did. He wants to believe they're innocent, and just victims of circumstance:
"In a world divided in two, the radical is free to choose one side or the other. That's the radical choice. The halves of the world are like the two hemispheres of Mengleburg. My mother and father fell through an open seam one day and then the hemispheres pressed shut."
He also is struggling with his need for complete control - over his wife, his sister, and his family's story. He needs to know the truth and be in control, even when it hurts those he loves. Along those lines, Daniel is not a nice person. He's pompous and abusive, especially toward his wife and infant son. But he is saved from being unsympathetic by the innocent child version of himself who lives through a nightmare.
Doctorow includes many asides in the novel, which are part of who Daniel is, and document his obsessions with the past through a tendency to wax philosophical. They feel like lectures.
A man in Daniel's youth talks a while about television: "Look there, what do you see? Little blue squares in every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials. That is today's school, man. In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime...commercials are learning units."
There is also a long lecture on the downfalls of Disneyland which isn't worth quoting. I did, however, enjoy a musing on technology:
"Technology is the making of metaphors from the natural world. Flight is the metaphor of air, wheels are the metaphor of water, food is the metaphor of earth. The metaphor of fire is electricity."
Finally, there's a long quotation about prison as a metaphor for death that I want to hold on to:
"Who wrote that Russian story, was it Babel or maybe Yuri Olesha, about a man dying in his bed. His death is described as a progressive deterioration of possibilities, a methodical constriction of options available to him. First he cannot leave the room, so that a railroad ticket, for instance, has no more meaning for his life. Then he cannot get out of bed. Then he cannot lift his head. Then he cannot see out the window. Then he cannot see his hand in front of him. Life moves inward, the sensations close in, the horizons diminish to point zero. And that is his death. A kind of prison cell concept of death, the man being locked in smaller and smaller cells, his own consciousness depleted of sensations being the last and smallest cell. It is a point of light. If this is true of death, then a real prison is death's metaphor and when you put a man in prison you are suggesting to him the degrees of death that are possible before life is actually gone. You are forcing him to begin his dying. All constraints on freedom enforce conditions of death. The punishment of prison inflicts the corruption of death on life"
Themes: 1950s, 1960s, American communism, family, innocence, Cold War, sex, family legacy, destruction of childhood, sibling love, the obscurity of truth
Daniel is struggling to come to terms with not knowing the truth about what his parents did. He wants to believe they're innocent, and just victims of circumstance:
"In a world divided in two, the radical is free to choose one side or the other. That's the radical choice. The halves of the world are like the two hemispheres of Mengleburg. My mother and father fell through an open seam one day and then the hemispheres pressed shut."
He also is struggling with his need for complete control - over his wife, his sister, and his family's story. He needs to know the truth and be in control, even when it hurts those he loves. Along those lines, Daniel is not a nice person. He's pompous and abusive, especially toward his wife and infant son. But he is saved from being unsympathetic by the innocent child version of himself who lives through a nightmare.
Doctorow includes many asides in the novel, which are part of who Daniel is, and document his obsessions with the past through a tendency to wax philosophical. They feel like lectures.
A man in Daniel's youth talks a while about television: "Look there, what do you see? Little blue squares in every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials. That is today's school, man. In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime...commercials are learning units."
There is also a long lecture on the downfalls of Disneyland which isn't worth quoting. I did, however, enjoy a musing on technology:
"Technology is the making of metaphors from the natural world. Flight is the metaphor of air, wheels are the metaphor of water, food is the metaphor of earth. The metaphor of fire is electricity."
Finally, there's a long quotation about prison as a metaphor for death that I want to hold on to:
"Who wrote that Russian story, was it Babel or maybe Yuri Olesha, about a man dying in his bed. His death is described as a progressive deterioration of possibilities, a methodical constriction of options available to him. First he cannot leave the room, so that a railroad ticket, for instance, has no more meaning for his life. Then he cannot get out of bed. Then he cannot lift his head. Then he cannot see out the window. Then he cannot see his hand in front of him. Life moves inward, the sensations close in, the horizons diminish to point zero. And that is his death. A kind of prison cell concept of death, the man being locked in smaller and smaller cells, his own consciousness depleted of sensations being the last and smallest cell. It is a point of light. If this is true of death, then a real prison is death's metaphor and when you put a man in prison you are suggesting to him the degrees of death that are possible before life is actually gone. You are forcing him to begin his dying. All constraints on freedom enforce conditions of death. The punishment of prison inflicts the corruption of death on life"
Themes: 1950s, 1960s, American communism, family, innocence, Cold War, sex, family legacy, destruction of childhood, sibling love, the obscurity of truth