The Book of Daniel : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: memories past and present
Review: Doctorow's compelling novel of revolutionary reminiscence is rendered through the loosely chained memories of its narrator, Daniel Issacson. Daniel recalls his parents, dignified and honest Marxist idealists seeking a way out of what they perceived, maybe rightfully so, as capitalist hegemony. Daniel's parents, Paul and Rochelle, are eventually betrayed by a fellow idealist(and dentist) who turns them in to save his own neck from federal investigators swimming in the mania of McCarthy-era extremism. His parents are honest in their ideals, never seeking revolution as a means to create anarchism, or any nefarious plots to create disorder out of unjust order.

The narrative style of the novel is particularly noteworthy. The plot of the book is a finely woven quilt recalling the history of a mysterious leftist underbelly of America in the middle of the twentieth century, admirably portrayed by its personifications in Paul and Rochelle. Daniel, the oldest of two children, is a graduate student at Columbia. He is tormented by the cloudy, romantic, and tender memories of his parents; even more so is his sister, Susan, who is intermittently hospitalized in many asylums, never having been able to overcome the incarceration and execution of her innocently martyred parents. Revolutionary sentiment and action are cast in reverie in the Book of Daniel. However, the reverie turns nightmarish in the blink of an eye. Never can genuine, spirited opposition to exploitation, as poetically embodied in Paul and Rochelle, ever be fully suppressed, since the human will always strives toward justice, no matter how twisted the manifestations seem to others around us. Remember Rochelle's execution: The electric chair failed to kill her the first time; it had to be reactivated. "The renunciation of resistance is the ratification of regression." - Theodor Adorno

Rating:
Summary: Pathos and Politics
Review: I have read most of E.L. Doctorow's novels and take great pleasure in the smoothness of their narratives, the sense that Doctorow has not misplaced or misused a single word. This same master's quality is evident in "The Book of Daniel", where it brings great imaginative precision to the lives of the Paul and Rachel Isaacson, a couple who are executed as spies and who are modeled on the Rosenbergs. To me, the book's most moving writing has the narrator, the Isaacson's son Daniel, remembering his parents as people with friends and commonplace lives, not as the couple who became powerful political symbols. In the book's end, Doctorow puts Dr. Mindish, the government's chief witness against the Isaacsons, in Disney Land 15 years after the trial, spinning pathetically on a ride, lacking identity in a gaudy and forgetful America.

Rating:
Summary: Bugs Bunny, totalitarian
Review: This is the first book I've read from E.L. Doctorow. His style is initially disconcerting because it isn't tethered to a linear structure. Time can't progress without folding in on itself. Even sentences are often interrupted and excised of all punctuation. Perspectives shift between first and third person -- which a previous reviewer noted can be confusing. Yet the book is so saturated in details, the characters display so many nuanced shades of anger and pride and cruelty and love, that it brings the book to a level that everyone can understand. The people in this book are such smart asses, all of them! Daniel's grandmother, the black man in his basement, the pathetic palsied Mindish who we're never quite permitted to hate. In that sense "Daniel" is a politically sophisticated work in that it acknowledges politics and government as flawed and limited structures created by flawed and limited people (like sentences). Daniel observes that his sister died by a lack of analysis. It's evident that an abundance of such is how he hopes to keep living. I left the book feeling like I was cheating myself by not having a mind as active and relentless as Daniel's. I'm grateful for this book. And I'm sort of glad it isn't very popular. Seems to confirm its authenticity.

Rating:
Summary: powerful...phenomenal
Review: This is the first book of Doctorow's I have read. Looking at his other books, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. But it certainly wasn't this. Doctorow's work has the feel of Kerouac, Burroughs, Heinein's Starship Troopers, Kesey, and Kafka. He takes an incident from one of the most turbulent and trying times in our nation's history and spins a story of a young man trying to understand the life and death of his parents (executed for treason). Doctorow takes on religion, Disney, and the political and social attitudes of America. And he does it well. Daniel is a man who is both confused and very knowing. He's a radical but not like any you've seen before. Doctorow's style is a little disconcerting the first few pages (he jumps between first and third person, both from Daniel's point-of-view, sometimes in mid-sentence), but after you adjust to it, it seems the only way this story could be told. This is a book you have to read. I didn't put it on my list of "best ever", but it was definitely short-listed for it.