Recent reading

The Book of Daniel. E. L. Doctorow. Go to Amazon.

An extraordinary novel, which I prefer even to Doctorow's Ragtime. Both have significant political levels of meaning. Here the concept is brilliant: what happens to the children of American Communists who are executed on trumped up charges? We have Daniel and his younger sister.

They visit their parents in prison:

I tried to think of things to tell her, things to make her feel good. I said I liked school. I said I enjoyed math. I said I had lots of friends. These were the lies of my letters, and to my disappointment she seemed to believe all of them. It is the same way you lie to very sick or old people to make them feel good, and let them believe that their pain has at least brought some order to the world. But it is a measure of the unreclaimable distance from you that they believe what you say.

Older, they attend protest rallies in the 1960s:

 The next day, Saturday, is the big event. We sit for hours in the grass at the Lincoln Memorial and listen to the speeches. All around us people with signs on placards, on poles. Young Christian men and women, veterans, radicals with long hair. Self-conscious professors, older women in walking shoes and red noses of pert participation. Guitarists. Freaks with painted faces and gendarme capes waving broom handles crowned with boxes decorated with pictures of flowers and Joan and Bobby and Allen. Scuba divers with white bones painted on their black wetsuits. Priests. Members of organizations with hand-painted banners. It is a beautiful day. All the happy freaks of cold war have poured out of their chartered buses, climbed out of their sleeping bags, each life famous, and come to march on the Pentagon.

 They go to Disneyland:

shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience. One cannot tour Disneyland today without noticing its real achievement, which is the handling of crowds. Coupled open vans, pulled by tractors, collect customers at various points of the parking areas and pour them out at the entrance to the park. The park seems built to absorb infinite numbers of customers in its finite space by virtue of the simultaneous appeal of numbers of attractions at the same time, including not only the fixed rides and exhibits and restaurants and shops but special parades and flag raising and lowering ceremonies, band concerts, and the like.

 They witness the execution of their parents:

There were a number of people in the room with him. The warden, the executioner, three guards, the rabbi, two doctors and three reporters chosen by lot to represent the press corps. One reporter was from the Herald Tribune, one was with Associated Press, and one was from the News. My father’s hands were shaking and his breathing was rapid and shallow. He had been advised that a phone with a direct line to Washington would be in the execution chamber. He did not look for it when he entered the room. He made no sign that acknowledged the presence of any of the onlookers. He had to be helped into the chair, gently lowered, like an invalid. When he was seated his breathing became more rapid. He closed his eyes and clenched his hands in his lap.

 Finally Daniel loses his troubled sister:

My sister is dead. She died of a failure of analysis. Last autumn’s leaves scuttle across the plots. The plots are separated by pipe fences or planted borders. We drive down the straight narrow streets of the cemetery. It seems to me ridiculous that a cemetery should have street names and that one place rather than another is designated for a person’s burial. It is a city for the dead, in their eyes, a holy place of rest for the dead, in urban grids, with stones and markers like buildings, and upper-class neighborhoods of fashionable crypts, and cooperative apartments in the name of this lodge or that. Some stones are so old they are brown, and very close together, as in ghettos. Fashions change, even in gravestones. The newer style is to have the family name unadorned on one large stone, and individual members’ identity declared on footstones. Poems and biblical quotations seem to be out.

The novel, speaking more directly to the McCarthy era and the sixties, nonetheless has a disturbing contemporary ring to it. It's political fiction of the first order.