July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

The Book of Daniel—Coherence from the Patterns of the Past

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts

We are at a moment when we have the power to alter human history or confirm it finally in its ancient awful courses. He [Stimson] writes a memo to Harry [Truman] dated September 11, 1945.
—E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel

In the days and weeks following September 11, 2001, a number of writers and artists issued pronouncements in forums such as the New York Times that sounded the relative or absolute inadequacy of poetry as a means of coming to terms with those events. And indeed, it was easy to feel, as the skies over the United States grew silent under the FAA ban on non-military flights, that language, however masterfully summoned, could not produce the coherence we needed. If big-name writers and artists were turning to music, however, it seemed that anyone with an e-mail account was reading and forwarding Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” for the solace its strange mix of prophecy and history could provide.

And perhaps Auden’s poem—in which the elder Bush’s “thousand points of light” are refracted as “ironic points of light”—did provide some of the necessary psychological distance to apprehend the immediate aftermath. But now, nearly two years later, the monumental wreckage hauled away and the real estate developers moving in, we need a literary response more precisely suited to the Age of Ashcroft, these days of Iraqi “liberation” and “First Amendment Zones.” Luckily, we need not wait. That response was published in 1971. It is E. L. Doctorow’s fictional rendering of the Rosenberg case, and it is called The Book of Daniel (Vintage Contemporaries, Random House).

The novel comes to us through the consciousness of Daniel Lewin, one of the “Isaacson” children, and its construction represents his struggles to understand the legacy that is his personal, family, and national history. As the sacrificial name “Isaacson” suggests, we are in the presence of an exacting God of the Old Testament. In this culture, however, that God goes by the name “Democracy,” and though He may be worshipped, He may not be questioned. Besides the events of the novel’s “present,” which runs from Memorial Day, 1967 into the following spring, the novel includes Daniel’s speculations on “The Nature and Function of God as Represented in the Bible”; miniature essays on forms of capital punishment in feudal Europe, Japan, and Russia (as well as nods to the guillotine of Republican France and the electric chair of postwar America); Daniel’s childhood memories (including a frightening account of a protest in Times Square after his parents’ conviction); short chunks of decidedly unsynthesized Soviet revolutionary history and Cold War strategy (“Citations available from Kennan . . ., Acheson, Dulles”); ruminations on the settings and props of our most sacred institutions (“Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theater”); a paean to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (in the form of Williams, the black janitor who lives in the basement of the Isaacsons’ house in the Bronx), all culminating (almost) in a character-driven set-piece which appears under the heading “Disneyland at Christmas.”

This is postmodern pastiche at its best, as emotionally affective as it is intellectually provocative. By presenting the story through multiple social and historical strands, which in effect become the multiple voices contending in Daniel’s head, Doctorow resists a master narrative (either the government’s or his own). As readers of this novel, we arrive at truths by navigating the sharp rocks and shallow reefs of faulty memory, disinformation, fear, and misinterpretation—just as we arrive at truths as citizens. The fact that historical and political truths are always provisional—because the story is not yet finished—does not lessen the importance of attempting to arrive at such truths. And given the political reality constructed for us minute by minute and day by day in the media, it becomes all the more important to insist—as Doctorow does—that the protections offered by the Constitution be absolute. As “Daniel” writes, “[I]f justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?” Alluding to the power of the media to transform and maintain public opinion, Doctorow dramatizes the arrest of Daniel’s father and then jumps to this single, open-ended, italicized phrase: The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union. . . .

The meaning and value of Daniel’s history, finally, is that the individual does matter. The act of remembering—perhaps the essential political act—matters. And so at the end of the section titled “Memorial Day,” we find Daniel, who was “born in Washington DC” remembering the war years, “a scrap metal drive . . . the Four Freedoms . . . ration stamps . . . President Roosevelt riding up the Grand Concourse in an open car without a hat.” Hidden in this last image, of course, is our memory of a subsequent president riding in a subsequent open car without a hat, and it is this memory, which we bring to our reading, that provides the preliminary vibrations of terror. For finally, Daniel says, “I remember standing on the porch of our house on Weeks Avenue. It was a warm afternoon and I had scraped my knee on the sidewalk. My mother came out to tell me that an atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. I looked up in the sky over the school yard, but the sky was clear. I listened for the sound of the bomb, but the sky was quiet.”

All of this is to say that in The Book of Daniel Doctorow has written a brilliant novel, one that illuminates the patterns of the present by setting them against the patterns of the past. And because there is a surprising or provocative emotional or political insight on every page, reading (and rereading) the novel brings the coherence that only the best art can bring.

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