E.L. Doctorow, who died Tuesday of complications from lung cancer at 84, was perhaps the most American novelist of his generation. 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.
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.
But 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.
Daniel is a tormented character, adrift amidst the radicalism of the 1960s, on the run from history. That, in his case, history was both personal and collective made him a quintessential Doctorow character.
“Every book has its own voice,” the author told me in 2006. “I think there’s a kind of ventriloqual thing that goes on when I write. I don’t ever want to hear my own voice; it’s one of the worst things that can happen. … In ‘The Book of Daniel,’ I wrote 150 pages and threw them away, they were so bad. 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.”
This quality of looking beyond himself, of seeking stories that were broader than personal testimony, was what set Doctorow apart. Each book was a different experience, with its own set of challenges and expectations.
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. In “The March” (2005) — his last great novel — he reimagined Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march as a kind of native Grand Guignol.
“When you use a historical character like Sherman,” he explained, “it’s your Sherman. You’re doing what a painter does when he paints a portrait. It’s a rendering. … Whether the character is publicly known or not publicly known, you’re doing the same thing.”
“Ragtime” was Doctorow’s breakthrough book, a best-seller and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. It was made into a film in 1981. It also led to the author being considered a historical novelist, which both was and wasn’t the case.
Certainly, 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. But Doctorow was equally at ease with contemporary characters and their conundrums.
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.