such as the development of motion pictures, polar exploration, and political upheavals led by radicals such as Emma Goldman. From his naïve viewpoint, the boy observes the explosive changes and the stresses of a society that does not know how to handle its own dissenting elements. Coalhouse Walker, for example, a proud black man who is insulted by a group of white firemen and who (more in the style of the 1960’s) resorts to violence and hostage taking, demands that society recognize his human rights.

Ragtime is similar to Welcome to Hard Times in that it has a fairy-tale quality. The prose is quite simple, descriptive and declarative, so that Doctorow could almost begin with the phrase “once upon a time.” It is clear, however, that his point is to link the past and the present, to show that the craving for mass entertainment at the beginning of the twentieth century naturally had its outlet in the invention of motion pictures, just as the urge of Arctic explorer Robert Peary and other explorers to roam the world had its industrial and societal counterpart in the mass production of the automobile. Repeatedly, Doctorow links the innovations in domestic life with great public adventures and events, fusing public and private affairs in an almost magical, uncanny manner.

The class distinctions that play an important role in Ragtime become the focal element of Loon Lake (1980), which, like The Book of Daniel, contains a double narrative perspective, shifting between the experience of a poet on a rich man’s isolated estate and a poor man’s picaresque adventures across 1930’s America. The power of the materialist, the millionaire capitalist, is meant to be balanced by the imagination of the poet, but the novel fails to measure up to Ragtime’s astonishing feat of fusing the realms of fiction and history. The poetic interludes in Loon Lake are reminiscent of the introverted, stream-of-consciousness “Camera Eye” sections of novelist John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1937), but they seem excessively obscure and introverted and disruptive of the novel’s narrative pace.

Nevertheless, Loon Lake has a haunting, ineffable quality, evoking a metaphorical but almost tangible sense of history which is akin to the novel’s image of the lake: a dazzling surface of ever-shifting and widening perspectives above glinting depths that are only suggested. History as mirror—refracting, distorting, highlighting, and obscuring human actions—is a palpable presence in Loon Lake. A great social novelist, Doctorow manages to describe every level and grouping of society in the soup kitchens, monasteries, mansions, and assembly lines of the United States between the two world wars.

In much of Doctorow’s work there is a tension between a naïve, childlike point of view, with fresh perceptions, and an older, ironic, detached perspective. Sometimes this split is expressed in terms of dual first-person and third-person narration, as in The Book of Daniel. In Ragtime, the narrator seems simultaneously to be the little boy and his older self, both witnessing and remembering the past. Likewise, throughout most of The Waterworks, McIlvaine appears to be describing events as they occur, but near the end of the novel he reveals that he has reflected upon this story for many years before finally telling it. Similarly, in City of God, Sarah’s father speaks in the voice of an adult describing childhood experiences in the ghetto, but at times the voice of the young messenger breaks through. World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate also seem more conventional than the earlier novels, for they are told from the standpoint of two narrators, both mature men reviewing their youth. Yet both novels unfold with such immediacy that they appear to be taking place as their narrators reminisce.

In The Waterworks, Doctorow again begins with a traditional genre: this time, the detective story. McIlvaine’s search for Martin Pemberton soon becomes a quest for truth beneath the veneer of Gilded Age society. The conflict between ethics and selfishness is once more played out within a family—the Pembertons. Most of the conflicts involve ethical decisions, and the most sympathetic characters are those whose integrity will not allow them to succumb to the corruption of the era. The most ambiguous character—and apparently the one most fascinating to Doctorow—is Dr. Wrede Sartorius, a German doctor who served as a Union Army surgeon during the Civil War. In The Waterworks, he is portrayed as an obsessed scientist who has allowed his pursuit of medical knowledge to destroy his humanity. When Doctorow returns to Sartorius, in The March, the doctor’s compassion can be seen more clearly, though his experiences as an Army surgeon eventually result in a detachment that seems to anticipate his later isolation from humanity. Perhaps McIlvaine’s interest in Sartorius’s ideas implies a similar isolation on his part, as the roles of both journalist and doctor require them to be primarily observers of human life.

Similar quests for truth and knowledge are significant elements in City of God. The novel begins with a discussion of the Big Bang theory, and references to science, particularly astronomy, recur throughout the novel, apparently suggesting a universe in which humans may be left to devise their own moral and ethical standards without the guidance of religious doctrine. One likely result is seen in the scenario devised by Everett, the writer and would-be filmmaker: A man begins an affair with a married woman, through plastic surgery remakes himself until he literally (as well as figuratively) usurps her husband’s life, and is killed by the displaced husband, who finally is convicted of killing himself in the person of the impostor. In this supposed film script, Everett deals symbolically with one’s position in the postmodern world where scientific possibility has replaced religion as the governing force in human interactions.

On an individual level, however, Thomas Pemberton (Pem) doubts the religious tenets his father taught, and his eventual rejection of the church may in part be a break with his father similar to Martin Pemberton’s renunciation of his patrimony in The Waterworks. Though no explicit link appears, Doctorow may want the reader to see Pam as both a literal and a symbolic heir of Martin. Pem’s quest leads him to explore the meaning of human suffering and perhaps even of human history. As Everett, the narrator and observer of his actions, comes to realize, humankind’s satisfaction cannot be achieved through science, violence, revenge, intolerance, or analysis of the culture; like medieval theologians, Doctorow suggests that the search for God is more significant than the conclusions one reaches.

While City of God is more overtly philosophical than most of Doctorow’s fiction, it uses some of the familiar devices. The lives of well-known historical figures, such as Albert Einstein, often parallel the lives of the major characters, usually unknown people who are searching for their own identities, often within a meaningful family relationship. Doctorow’s most innovative strategy for thematic development, though, is the interspersed performances by the Midrash Jazz Quartet. Their commentaries on the so-called standards, ranging from “Me and My Shadow” to “The Song Is You,” serve as a commentary on the characters’ thoughts and actions. When Pem hears the young nun singing these songs to McIlvaine in the charity hospital, he decides that secular songs can affect him in the same way as hymns.

In contrast, the short stories collected in Sweet Land Stories (2004) reflect their magazine roots; plots are highly compressed, with the primary focus on characters, many of whom are duplicitous. Nevertheless, these stories develop several familiar Doctorow themes: Within families, intergenerational conflicts develop, involving ethical questions; generally poor characters are relatively powerless in dealing with wealthy Establishment types; and social issues frequently are seen both in the wider context of society and in the narrower context of the family, and conventional ties can be badly strained as a result. Nevertheless, these stories have not received the critical acclaim usually accorded to Doctorow’s novels. The difference may be that the short-story format does not allow Doctorow to create his customary detailed historical backgrounds or to develop representative characters that evoke reader empathy. Thus “A House in the Plains” can be described as an unduly macabre comment on American public taste, and “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” can be characterized as another indictment of governmental and corporate indifference to the effects of environmental pollution. Perhaps Doctorow has recognized this problem because in The March, he returned to the novel format, emphasizing representative characters as they deal with situation and issues of historical importance.

The Book of Daniel

First published: 1971

Type of work: Novel

In the turbulent 1960’s, in the midst of social protest and calls for revolution, Daniel searches for the significance of his parents’ execution for espionage.

The Book of Daniel is in many ways a political mystery story. As young children, Daniel and his sister lose their parents. Condemned as spies and betrayed by members of their own family, Daniel’s parents are martyrs in the view of the Left, which is sure they are innocent. As far as Daniel is concerned, however, his parents abandoned him, and he is doubtful that they understood the implications of their actions or how much their behavior actually played into the hands of the government that executed them.

Daniel finds it both fascinating and frustrating to try to piece together the past. When he finally tracks down the relative who informed on his parents, for example, Daniel finds that he is senile. So many years have passed that it is difficult either to re-create the feelings of another age or to determine the truth of the charges against his parents. Without a heritage he can share with others, Daniel feels isolated and without an identity. He wonders on what basis he can live his own life when he has such fundamental and apparently unanswerable questions about his own parents.

As a student of history, however, Daniel is capable of seeing things in terms larger than his own personal obsessions. The chapters of the novel alternate between first-person and third-person narration as Daniel himself swings from subjectivity to objectivity. His plight, he gradually realizes, is not so different from that of his country, which tends either to obliterate the past or to sentimentalize it. Daniel’s images of his parents lack a certain substance, as they have become figures in Cold War ideological battles, and the truth often eludes Americans who are fed a steady diet of entertaining, pacific, and nostalgic pictures of the past.

Near the end of The Book of Daniel, there is a brilliant set-piece description of Disneyland, which comes to stand for the forces in American life that threaten a complex sense of history. At Disneyland, which resembles a film set, are arranged the figures and artifacts of American history, the symbols and the tokens of the national heritage, wrenched from their social and historical context, abstracted into a series of entertainments for customers who do not have to analyze what is presented to them. This spectacle of history substitutes for the real thing, demeaning the past and replacing it with a comfortable and convenient product that need only be enjoyed and consumed.

What fuels Daniel’s anger is the way his parents allowed themselves to become symbols in the ideologies of the Left and the Right. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves, no matter what the cost to their family, appalls him. The human element, the complexity of loyalties to family and friends and country, is what distinguishes Doctorow’s novel, taking it out of the realm of the merely political while at the same time asking the most fundamental questions about the relationship between ideology and individualism. Until Daniel comes to terms with the humanity of his parents, he finds it impossible to get on with his own life and to care for his wife and child. Only by reclaiming his mother and father in terms that are far more complex than those of their public immolation can Daniel function as a husband and father.

Ragtime

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

At the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of world war and tremendous cultural changes, a proud black man defends his dignity by force.

Ragtime begins with a description of a comfortable American household in New Rochelle, New York, at the turn of the twentieth century. At the dinner table, Father, Mother, the little boy, and Mother’s Younger Brother are interrupted by the visit of a young black man, Coalhouse Walker. Eventually, it is discovered that Walker is the father of the child who had been abandoned by a young black woman who, along with the child, has been given refuge in the household. The appearance of Walker changes everything in the family’s life and eventually links the New Rochelle household directly to the fate of the United States. By not giving the family names, Doctorow emphasizes their role as representatives of white, middle-class life, gradually and inexorably drawn into the changing times of radicals, immigrants, and African Americans.

Doctorow uses Walker as the agent of change. This proud black man is offended when his motorcar is stopped by a group of unruly volunteer firemen who then block his way and (when he goes for assistance) deface his prized possession. Unable to obtain satisfaction from the law (he finds it impossible to file charges or to be taken seriously by the authorities), Walker takes justice into his own hands, recruiting a group of black comrades who devise an ingenious plan to occupy the J. P. Morgan Library in New York City and demand the return of Walker’s car in pristine condition—or the precious building will be detonated with explosives.

While no such incident occurred in the years Ragtime covers, and it is unlikely that such an incident could have taken place, Doctorow is less concerned with realism than with the implications of historical change. His novel is a compression of history, a fable making the point that the Establishment in the twentieth century will eventually find it more and more difficult to ignore the new immigrants and blacks and to give them the runaround that Walker experiences. Thus the participation of Younger Brother—the only white man in Walker’s gang—is again symbolic of what is about to happen in history: the joining together of white dissenters, radicals, and (in some cases) communists with disaffected minorities who will demand their rights. Younger Brother, after all, chafes under the paternalistic, authoritarian household of his brother-in-law and sees in Walker the chance to overturn—or at least challenge—the status quo.

Indeed, Ragtime is studded with historical characters who, through their politics, their inventions, or their imaginations, disrupt the status quo. Emma Goldman, a communist, Jacob Riis, a photographer of the slums, and Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, all figure in the novel, because each of them speaks to the public’s dream of overcoming or breaking out of the status quo. Younger Brother, for example, is attracted not only to political activity but also to Evelyn Nesbit, the nubile model who excited public attention when her husband shot and murdered famous architect Stanford White because of White’s alleged defilement of her. In turn, Doctorow has Nesbit form an infatuation with both Emma Goldman and with Tateh, the immigrant silhouette maker and (later) filmmaker, because each of them, in different ways, embodies romantic visions of America—of America as an equal and just society, as a land of dreams fulfilled.

The novel’s intricate layering of historical and invented figures tends to dissolve the barriers between public and private life and between the wealthy and the poor. Doctorow is not concerned with whether such characters could, in fact, meet; rather, he is intent on demonstrating that in terms of the way people have experienced the United States there is a kind of imagination of the country that pervades every level of life. Evelyn Nesbit’s dream of success, in other words, is much the same as the immigrant’s, and so she eventually stars in one of Tateh’s films. In the deepest sense of the word, Doctorow is a democratic novelist who shows that class divisions dissolve in the light of the commonality of American behavior, that the very things that split Americans apart are also the things that unite them.

Walker’s concern for his car is itself a very American concern—attaching his sense of dignity to a piece of machinery and making it an extension of himself. There is much humor and irony in Doctorow’s treatment of America, but it is also the sly criticism of an insider, of a writer who revels in the country’s contradictions and who shows that the myth of America, seen in its broadest terms, can encompass all groups, classes, and races of people.

World’s Fair

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

A remembrance of New York City in the 1930’s, from the perspective of a boy writing about “The Typical American Boy” for an essay contest.

In comparison to Doctorow’s earlier novels, World’s Fair seems remarkably straightforward. It resembles a work of conventional nonfiction, and like a memoir, it is largely bound by a chronological structure. Much of the action is seen through the consciousness of a young boy, Edgar, growing up in the Bronx during the 1939-1940 World’s Fair. Given the character’s name and background, it is difficult not to conclude that Doctorow has himself and his family in mind. He had used his New Rochelle house as a model for the house in Ragtime and the mind of a young boy as the intuitive medium through which many of the domestic, private events of the novel were filtered. Doctorow’s interest in the way the fictional and factual impinge upon each other would naturally lead to this exercise in quasi-autobiography, in which the materials from his own background underpin the plot. The World’s Fair becomes a metaphor for the boy’s growing up and for the United States’ maturation.

Unlike many American novelists, Doctorow does not merely criticize American materialism, seeing in the emphasis on things a soul-deadening culture which is antithetical to the artist’s imagination. On the contrary, he enjoys playing with and observing the materiality of the United States—decrying, to be sure, the way in which the culture turns its important figures and events into toys and commercials for capitalism but also capturing the American delight in inventiveness and machinery and honoring it. In World’s Fair, he triumphantly combines the personal and the familiar aspects of life with the way a society celebrates itself. In doing so, he recovers the synthesis of history and literature that made Ragtime such a resounding success.

Compared with the characters in his other fiction, Edgar is unusual. He is a well-behaved boy with none of the rebelliousness that characterizes Younger Brother or Billy Bathgate. Society impinges just as significantly in World’s Fair as it does in the other novels, with Edgar getting roughed up in his neighborhood for being a “Jewboy” and shaken up by the portentous crash of the German dirigible Hindenburg, which shows him how the apparent calm of his life and other American lives can be abruptly shattered by disaster.

As are Doctorow’s other novels, World’s Fair is full of fascinating period detail and places—the arrival of a water wagon, the Good Humor man, and a New York Giants game at the Polo Grounds. There is less plot, however, than in other Doctorow works to hold this novel together. Essentially, the narrative turns on Edgar’s anticipation of the fair, on his preparations for it, on his anxieties about whether his rather undependable father will take him, and on his chances of winning the essay contest.

World’s Fair is structured as a series of vignettes, the logic of which depends upon Edgar’s sensibility rather than on the events themselves. In this respect, Doctorow reverses the pattern of Ragtime, in which human character is so definitely at one with the pattern of history. Called nostalgic and charming by many reviewers, World’s Fair is somewhat surprising in that Doctorow does not analyze the ideological basis of the World’s Fair, dissecting what it means for a modern technological society. The author in this work is much more concerned with the actual “feel” of experience, with a man remembering his youth, than with using it as a pretext for a political lesson.

Billy Bathgate

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

A Bronx boy grows up infatuated with Dutch Schultz and his gang, learning to survive and prosper even as the gangsters of his youth die out.

The first long sentence of Billy Bathgate launches right into the excitement of a scene in which Dutch Schultz is disposing of a disloyal associate, Bo Weinberg. The setting is described by fifteen-year-old Billy Bathgate, the novel’s narrator, who is impressed with the smooth running of the Dutchman’s criminal enterprise. A car drives up to a dark dock; without using any light or making a sound, Schultz’s crew gets on a boat with Bo and his girlfriend, Drew Preston. Schultz’s control over the situation is awesome and inspiring for the young boy, who has been given the honor of running errands and performing other chores for the famous gang. He becomes their mascot and good luck charm.

Schultz has a way of utterly changing the face of things, and for a long time, working for him has a fairy-tale quality to it. Billy is enchanted by the sheer magic of the way Schultz gets things done. No sooner is Bo Weinberg overboard with his cement overshoes than Schultz is making love to Drew Preston—a socialite who is fascinated, for a while, by his presence and energy. She even accompanies Schultz to Onondaga in upstate New York, where he takes over a town, plying the locals with gifts and setting up a cozy atmosphere in preparation for what he rightly expects will be a favorable jury verdict in the case the government has brought against him for tax evasion.

Schultz’s great strength, however, is also his great weakness. By making all of his business revolve around him, he fails to see how crime is becoming organized and corporate. His way of doing business is almost feudal—depending almost entirely on violence and on the loyalty of subordinates—and he has no grasp of how to put together an organization that can compete with the combinations of power being amassed by the government and by his rival, Lucky Luciano. Schultz wants to personalize everything so that it all evolves out of his own ego. That ego is unstable, however; on an impulse, he kills an uncooperative colleague in an Onondaga hotel. This is only one of many instances when he goes berserk and literally pounds his opponent into the floor.

Members of Schultz’s gang—particularly his accountant, Abbadabba Berman—sense that the old ways of doing things are nearly finished. Weinberg’s defection is only the beginning of events which put Schultz on the defensive and which culminate in his gangland murder near the end of the novel. Berman tries to convince Schultz to do business in the new way, to recognize that he is part of a larger crime network, but Schultz can think only in terms of his own ambitions. He calls off plans to amalgamate with Lucky Luciano and other gangsters. In compensation, perhaps, for Schultz’s inability to adapt to new times, Berman turns to Billy, making him an apprentice and lavishing attention on the boy. Berman plies Billy with advice and gives him assignments that build his confidence and extend his knowledge of the business.

Through Berman and Preston, Billy gains perspective on Schultz. Preston, Billy finds, has her own sort of power and sense of ease. When she tires of Schultz, she simply leaves him, conveying to Billy the impression that Schultz’s charisma has its limits. Billy never dares to think of actually leaving the gang, but he keeps his own counsel and is prepared to take care of himself when Schultz is murdered. At the death scene, in which Schultz, Berman, Lulu, and Irving have been shot, Billy learns from Berman the combination of the safe in which Schultz has stashed much of his loot. Evasive about his subsequent career, Billy intimates at the end of the novel that he has indeed amassed the Dutchman’s fortune, but he does not vouchsafe what he will do with it.

In this fast-paced adventure novel, which takes quick tours of the Bronx, upstate New York, Saratoga, and the docks of Manhattan, Doctorow supplies the color and the texture of the 1930’s. As Billy prospers in the service of gangster Dutch Schultz and gets to know these different worlds, he finds it impossible to return as he was to his old neighborhood. When he does return, he is immediately perceived as a different person. He dresses differently, carries himself differently, and has a consciousness of a world that extends far beyond the Bathgate Avenue from which he derives his assumed name. Billy becomes, in other words, a self-invented figure, transcending his origins not only in the actions he narrates but also in his very language, which is at once colloquial and formal, a blend of popular and sophisticated vocabulary that precisely captures the boy and the man who has become the narrator of this novel. In this quintessential American story, Doctorow has managed yet another stunning version of the hero’s quest for identity and success.

The Waterworks

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

Class exploitation is exemplified in both political corruption and scientific experiments by which wealthy men are kept alive at the expense of poor children.

The Waterworks, set in New York City in 1871, poses the lives of Doctorow’s characters against the background of significant social and political change. Civil War idealism has deteriorated into selfishness at all levels: “A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.”

Robber barons control the city’s financial life, and the newspapers refuse to print anything negative about them, even when several die and leave their families as paupers. Graft and corruption dominate the city’s political life; no business or civic projects can exist without payoffs to Boss Tweed’s notorious political machine. Most judges, prosecutors, and police officers take bribes.

Millennial religious groups are challenging traditional religious authority and actively opposing scientific inquiry. Scientists suggest public acceptance of scientific inquiry has progressed little beyond the antidissection riots of one hundred years earlier. The enthusiasm for technological advances, celebrated by Walt Whitman, no longer exists.

These elements are significant in The Waterworks’s plot as McIlvaine, editor of The Telegram, searches for his lost reporter, Martin, the self-disinherited son of recently deceased tycoon Augustus Pemberton. Immediately before his disappearance, Martin told family and friends that he had begun to doubt his own sanity because twice he had seen his father riding in a city stage. Reverend Charles Grimshaw of St. James Church suggests that this vision could be a hallucination caused by Martin’s guilt about his estrangement from his father, but he cannot explain why Augustus, a long-time communicant of St. James, chose to be buried elsewhere.

McIlvaine interviews Martin’s fiancé, his stepmother, and his closest friend, but progress begins when he consults Captain Edmund Donne, one of the city’s few honest police officers. From one of Donne’s informants, they learn that poor children supposedly are being taken to the Home for Little Wanderers, an institution no one seems able to locate geographically. Initially McIlvaine believes they have located another instance of Boss Tweed’s graft, but eventually “the Home” is identified as an elaborate laboratory located under the municipal waterworks. There they find Martin, barely alive.

In several weeks as a captive in this laboratory, Martin has learned that Augustus and several other wealthy but dying men have surrendered all their possessions to finance the experiments of Dr. Wrede Sartorius, a skilled surgeon who now is experimenting with ways to extend the lives of dying patients by using blood and glands from young children. Though they violate society’s laws and religious tenets, his secret experiments have been allowed to continue because bribes have been paid to politicians and policemen. Meanwhile, the laboratory’s business manager has been stealing the money that the dying robber barons have in effect stolen from their own families.

After Dr. Sartorius is committed to a mental institution, McIlvaine interviews him, trying to determine if the doctor is a dedicated scientist (as he claims) or a monster without human feelings. McIlvaine insists that he wants to tell the doctor’s story in his newspaper. The reader learns, however, that this search happened years ago, but McIlvaine has never written his exclusive story, though he is still a newspaper editor. Doctorow seems to suggest that McIlvaine, like Martin initially, remains fascinated by the personalities and ethical problems raised by some of the actors in this drama, especially Dr. Sartorius. The novel seems to question the point at which experiments on human subjects cease to be justified as advancing scientific knowledge.

City of God

First published: 2000

Type of work: Novel

Inspired by St. Augustine’s treatise, this novel analyzes the factors behind the decline of Christianity in the twentieth century.

In City of God, Doctorow’s underlying theme is humanity’s quest for meaning. Everett, the writer-narrator, is compiling a nonfiction account of the way his friend Pem (Thomas Pemberton) is dealing with loss of religious conviction. The son of a clergyman, Pem has repeatedly been disillusioned by his own ethical failures, especially his failure to discover a rational basis for Christian faith. He is considering a complete break with the church—a literal rejection of Christianity and a symbolic rejection of his father.

Then, a seemingly random street crime brings Pem into contact with Joshua Green, his wife Sarah Blumenthal, and their Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. A large brass cross stolen from the wall of St. Timothy’s is found on the synagogue’s roof. The cross seems symbolic of Pem’s diminished religious conviction: Beneath its brass veneer, it is steel, and it can easily be dismantled because it consists of two parts held together with screws. Pem never discovers the identity or motives of the thieves, but he sees the theft as a sign leading him to Joshua and Sarah, rabbis whose search for the City of God parallels his own. Complicating their quest, though, are stories of the Holocaust told by Sarah’s father, who is sinking into dementia. For Joshua especially, modern society seems overwhelmed by what St. Augustine called “the City of the World,” and he is martyred as he tries to reveal the ghetto horrors, thus ending humanity’s apparent indifference to the Holocaust.

Everett too becomes obsessed with the ghetto stories, which become the new focus of his book. Recording those stories brings him into closer contact with his own heritage, as he explores his father’s World War I exploits and those of his brother in World War II.

First Joshua and later Pem search for the long-lost ghetto records. In effect, Pem avenges his friend’s death by locating the trunk of records written by ghetto leaders, smuggled out by Sarah’s father and preserved by an anti-Nazi Roman Catholic priest. Sarah gives the originals to the government to be used as evidence against war criminals, and Everett uses her photocopies to complete his book.

Near the end of the novel is another symbolic film scenario. Obsessed with a war criminal living in the United States, a writer stalks the old man, considering ways to execute him, then accidentally kills him in a bike accident. Although the writer escapes capture, newspaper accounts portray him as the villain, and the old man is honored instead of dishonored. In contrast, even though the ghetto accounts are located too late to prosecute the local commandant, using contemporary accounts to authenticate his atrocities proves a more effective revenge.

As the novel ends, Pem converts to Judaism and, with Sarah, continues his quest to establish meaningful religious traditions. Soon they are married—a symbolic union of Jewish and Christian traditions prefigured early in the novel when Everett observes a great blue heron and a snowy white egret perched back to back, sharing a New York City pier. Near the novel’s end, another ecumenical symbol appears as Everett describes the City of Birds, near Madrid, where many species of birds peaceably pick over a huge garbage dump.

“A House in the Plains”

First published: 2001 (collected in Sweet Land Stories, 2004)

Type of work: Short story

In this macabre story set at the turn of the twentieth century, Doctorow demonstrates that predatory behavior is not a modern or urban phenomenon.

In “A House in the Plains,” Earle, the eighteen-year-old narrator, describes the machinations of Mama, who insists that he call her Aunt Dora, following their hasty departure from Chicago when Dora’s latest husband dies. Earle regrets leaving city attractions, especially Winifred, an older woman who is his longtime sexual partner.

Dora and Earle move to a farm outside LaVille, Illinois, where Dora establishes herself as a wealthy widow who takes in three foster children from the New York slums. She also brings in a cook-housekeeper who speaks no English. The only local she employs is Bent (the handyman), with whom she begins a sexual relationship.

Once Dora establishes her positive image, her character as a black widow emerges. Taking advantage of Nordic immigrants with enough money to buy land but no real understanding of American culture, she offers them a partnership in the farm, which she has heavily mortgaged at the local bank. Bent is jealous of these men, but none seem to remain. Meanwhile, Dora’s bank account mysteriously grows.

Two incidents lead to a climactic resolution. Henry Lundgren, a Swedish immigrant, shows up, demanding to know what happened to his brother Per, who disappeared after meeting with Dora; and Winifred writes Earle that the husband’s remains were exhumed and the police are looking for Dora.

A few days later, the farmhouse burns, and two headless bodies are found inside, along with the bodies of the three children. Bent has been very thoroughly framed for the crime. The site of this tragedy draws gawkers from as far away as Chicago and Indianapolis—arguably Doctorow’s comment on Americans’ fascination with the macabre. Winifred arrives to see where Earle died, but as he reveals that he is alive, he also tells her that she is now an accessory after the fact and insists she accompany him and Dora to California.

“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden”

First published: 2004 (collected in Sweet Land Stories, 2004)

Type of work: Short story

Contemporary concerns with environmental pollution and government cover-ups are seen as justified as this story reflects their destructive effects—physical and ethical.

The narrator of “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” is Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agent Brian W. Molloy. The morning after a White House concert, a sixty-year-old groundskeeper discovers the shrouded body of a young boy. Hysteria in the post-September 11 world leads to his detention as a terrorist, until his daughter (a lawyer at the Treasury Department) files a missing person report. Probably no further investigation would have been conducted, but the Washington, D.C., police and the Post receive letters informing them about the boy.

As Molloy investigates, he quickly encounters officials who want the case ignored. Using his own time and money, Molloy follows a lead to Utilicon, a Southwestern power company headquartered in Beauregard, Texas. There he learns that the boy, Roberto Guzman, died of an incurable disease caused by environmental pollution from Utilicon. Roberto’s father, a gardener at Utilicon, has been detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and is scheduled for deportation.

Clearly someone wants to draw public attention to the dangerous pollution, and Molloy quickly discovers that Christina Stevens (daughter of Utilicon’s chairman) and her boyfriend, a Marine assigned to the White House, are responsible for placing Roberto’s body in the Rose Garden. As a result, Christina has been confined to a private mental hospital and fed a diet of tranquilizers.

Realizing that he is essentially powerless, Molloy nonetheless calls the government official and quietly informs him that unless the Guzmans are allowed to return to their home, the story will quickly be distributed to the media. This action marks the end of his career; so, as the story ends, Molloy has just written his letter of resignation.