Even a diary entry made at night, he pointed out, is already describing history, and, given human nature and memory, probably doing so falsely. As a modernist, he believed that all written accounts – contemporary documents, memoirs, newspapers, novels – are different varieties of invention. Some reviewers – led, to the author’s irritation, by his revered fellow practitioner, Updike – fretted about how to know which bits of his books were history and which were just his story. Doctorow always took pleasure in fictional characters doing factual things and factual characters behaving fictionally. While American literature classes should certainly study Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, students of American history should carefully consult other sources before using Doctorow’s novels as the basis for essays on the early 20th century, and the prohibition and civil war periods that they seem to describe so authoritatively. Photograph: Buena Vista Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis This embodied the central Doctorow paradox of being regarded largely as a historical novelist, even though he freely and deliberately played loose with any concept of the truth of the past.įictional characters doing factual things … Dustin Hoffmann in the film adaptation of Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate. Nobody complained at his laborious redrafting of novels (a previous career as a publishing editor intensified his attention to literary craft). As the author began and then abandoned various opening sentences – rejecting, “On Monday morning, my daughter …” because it sounded like a legal deposition and “Following a bout of …” for being pseudo-forensic – the child’s exasperated mother grabbed the pen and notebook and wrote a short sentence explaining that the child had been absent due to a brief cold. One of the best anecdotes about the drawbacks of living with a writer is Doctorow’s account of being asked one morning by his wife, Helen, to scribble a note to the school explaining why one of their three children had missed lessons the previous day. Doctorow also published far fewer books than Norman Mailer, Updike and Roth, his relatively short shelf partly due to a slow, meticulous composition not restricted to professional texts.
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