BOOKS
135
There seems at first to be something more, and something
more mysterious, taking place in E.
L.
Doctorow's latest book of
stories. The first six sketches in this fashionably thin volume (145
pages with broad margins and two or three blank pages between sec–
tions) are all writerly two-finger exercises, but they move swiftly, ar–
restingly, through the haunted streets oflightless, dateless mill towns
sometime in the past. One flips through them as through some musty
daguerrotypes in an album; the tales have the unworldly immediacy
of snapshots from a dream. As
Ragtime
proved, Docotorow can tell
an arresting story; his phrases grab one by the lapel, and he usually
moves well on his rhythmical feet. These sketches seem no more
than practice pieces, excuses for Doctorow to take his reader for an
evocative ride, but they are not without a few nice touches: picture–
perfect descriptions of the way schoolgirls lick ice-cream cones, say,
or how "a weird light layover everything, as if the sun, fallen from
the sky, had broken into leaves ."
That is not to say that Doctorow sustains his prose infallibly. In
the story "Willi," for example, he commits the following phrases
within the space of four narrow pages: "I imagined the earth's soul
lifting to the warmth of the sun and mingling me in some divine em–
brace"; (upon seeing, as a boy, his mother making love to his tutor in
a barn), "How can I describe what I felt! I felt I deserved to see this!
... I wanted to kill him, this killer of my mother who was killing her
. .. I wanted to be him";
"If
memory is a matter of the stimulation of
so many cells of the brain, the greater the stimulus - remorse, the
recognition of fate - the more powerfully complete becomes the sen–
satibn of the memory until there is transfer, as in a time machine,
and the memory is in the ontological sense another reality." Then,
four pages later, at the conclusion of this vividly unexceptional tale
of walking in the fields and romping in the hay, the narrator
declares, suddenly and out of nowhere, "This was in Galicia in the
year 1910. All of it was to be destroyed anyway, even without me ."
The ending is indeed deeply disquieting, but not, I think, in the way
intended. For it makes the mundane story seem like a wind-up
gadget, equipped with a cheap little device designed to invest it,
retroactively, with a power that the narrative itself has failed to earn.
Could one not append this line to any story as a shortcut to
resonance and poignancy?
That same strain of trickery informs the structure of the volume
as a whole; having collected six miscellaneous doodles, Doctorow ar–
tificially connects, and apparently hopes to transform, them by ap–
pending a long concluding piece that purports to be the story of the
