[In the following review, Kauffman explains the intricacies of The Book of Daniel, revealing it as "a work of historic and psychic currents."]

This is less a review than a celebration. [With The Book of Daniel,] E. L. Doctorow has written the political novel of our age, the best American work of its kind that I know since Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey. Doctorow could hardly be less like Trilling in style or temper, but that's part of the point; it helps to make this novel the quintessence of the '60s, as Trilling, in 1947, fixed the political '30s.

The time of the book, the "present" time, is mostly 1967, between Memorial Day and Christmas. Daniel Lewin, twenty-seven, is a graduate student at Columbia, and this book is (and is not!) what he writes instead of a dissertation. He's the son of Communist parents, Bronx Jews, who were executed at Sing Sing in the early 1950s for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. He has a younger sister. The book is built on his attempts to find the truth about his parents, about himself in relation to them, and on his relations with his sister in her attempts to regain sanity.

The premise is only one of the potentially troublesome elements in the book that Doctorow converts into triumph. The Rosenberg parallel might have been a mere gimmick. (Trilling, triumphing likewise, based a major character on Whittaker Chambers.) There is no tricky plot. And most certainly it's not a forensic novel about whether the Rosenbergs were really innocent or really guilty. This is an artwork about the idea of the Rosenbergs and people like them, how they came into being in this country, why their trial was needed, what their legacy is, and the intertexture of that legacy with the social-political climate today. I haven't looked up the facts of the Rosenberg case; it would be offensive to the quality of this novel to check it against those facts. This is a work of historic and psychic currents.

The parents were named Isaacson. (Nothing has been chosen lightly in this book, including names. The first Isaac, we remember, was nearly sacrificed to his father's beliefs.) They were first-generation Americans, he a radio repairman with a tiny Bronx shop, she the daughter of a crazy old woman who wrote Bintel Briefs to a Yiddish newspaper, recounting persecution in Russia and fierce struggle on the lower East Side.

After the Isaacsons' execution, their two children, fourteen and nine, were adopted by a Boston law professor and wife named Lewin. The book begins with a trip that Daniel and his young wife and baby make to Massachusetts, to join the Lewins in a visit to the mental hospital where his sister is confined. She was taken there after cutting her wrists in a Howard Johnson's ladies room nearby. The book ends—one of the three endings that are proposed—with the sister's funeral. In between we are pressed to a kaleidoscopic vision of the present and the intermingled past, of political history as it applies to the Isaacsons, of the fires of this century as they burn to and through the borders of all our lives.

A second triumph of Doctorow's is the form of the book. Daniel, the "author," often says that he hates the idea of sequence. The temporal urge of this book is toward simultaneity, not only of time planes but of different viewpoints. Not only are the present and various pasts closely interwoven but also various views of Daniel himself, who is seen in both the third and first persons—sometimes in successive sentences. As with many modern sensibilities, Doctorow has fractured seamless sequence because he felt, evidently, that the turbulence which bred and surrounds Daniel is always present with him, all of it, all the time. Doctorow's cascading form sweeps along with it occasional thematic variations, one of them a "True History of the Cold War" in the shape (says the author) of a raga.

Another important part of the method, throughout the book, is the consciousness that the book is being written. For instance: "I suppose you think I can't do the electrocution, I know there is a you … I will show you that I can do the electrocution." And then Doctorow-Daniel does it, unforgettably. This now-familiar consciousness of art in the making of art, this attempt to fix the act of creation as part of the finished work, can be both disarming and enriching, as it is here. "Nothing up my sleeve" adds to the magic, for the modern consciousness that is suspicious of magic.

(In fact, I wish Doctorow had used this method in one "straight" section: the climactic meeting between Daniel and his parents' accuser, years after their death, in Disneyland at Christmas. The irony of the setting and season might have lost its slightly pat touch if Daniel had capitalized on the Disneyland aspects of the meeting.)

A third triumph is that this novel's untraditional form has not subverted traditional fiction values. Doctorow might have thrown all his creative energy into glittering sequences and like some contemporary writers, including some good ones—might have asked the fulfillment of the design to be the work. But he achieves other ends as well.

Character. Every character in this book, major or minor, is sharply visible, has a voice—even a peripheral character like the Isaacsons' Negro janitor, the black man whom these society-changing Communists, these Jews who have known persecution, are quite willing to relegate to a bare cot in the cellar; and who is symbolically waiting. Place. Every setting, every occasion has an essence, an odor: a dusty radioshop window of the '40s, a Yippie pad in the East Village (where, fifty years before, Daniel's grandmother had struggled!), a Paul Robeson concert in the late '40s, a Washington Peace March in 1967. Drama. Every sequence is handled by a dramatist, is understood to its conclusion—just one example, the Dickensian episode in which the Isaacson children flee the children's shelter, while their parents are in jail awaiting trial.

And everything in this scintillating, yet deeply mined book feeds its theme. Here is an approximation of that theme. Political radicalism was brought to the US by late 19th-century immigrants, many of whom were East European Jews. Previous political impulses in this country had usually been comfortably meliorist, often theologically based. With increasing socio-economic pressures, partly caused by those very immigrants, the European ideologies that the immigrants brought with them became more and more germane. Therefore it's idle to speak of those ideologies as European concepts imposed on America: those immigrants, and their progeny, now are part of America, and the very changes caused by their interfusion have placed their ideologies among the American antecedents and options.

In its reaction against those ideologies, not an entirely deplorable reaction in itself, the US has gone through several spasms of purge, cruelly antithetical to our constitutional premises. One such spasm was the Red spy hunt, of the late '40s when this country needed victims to console itself for the fact that Russia was getting the bomb.

This novel faces up squarely and intelligently to the Jewishness of its subject. Jews had been persecuted, Jews are historically avid for social justice, Jews had less at stake in Anglo-Saxon-cum-Yankee traditions and rewards. Jews were in big cities mainly, cities were trouble spots, Jews were troublemakers. Doctorow refuses to blink any of this. On the contrary, by plunging his hands into the nettles, he plucks out the flower. By confronting the matter in fullest human resonance, he transforms parochialism into universals. His Jews become prototypical.

Out of all this background, partially in reaction against it, come many of today's revolutionaries. (No longer so markedly Jewish, by any means.) Their anti-intellectualism has its roots in impatience with the Bach-and-Shakespeare radicals of the past. Pop culture and pot culture are a reproof of all that Parnassian pipe-smoking culture that, in their view, merely mirrored the oppressive society at a different angle. Socially and psychically too, there have been both connection and change. Doctorow shows us how pervasively sexual the Isaacson marriage was. Daniel has inherited that sexuality, as he inherited radicalism, but has rejected his parents' "respectability," as he rejects formal ideology. A bizarre sex episode with his wife in a moving car is a declaration of continuity and independence.

And beneath the large theme that underlies the book is the even larger contemporary crisis in consciousness: the crisis of faith in rationalism, the faith so hard-won in the last few centuries; the resurgence of the Myth of Unreason because the Myth of Reason has not only failed so far to bring the promised grace but may have become a habit-forming narcotic. One need not subscribe to this belief, as for the most part I do not, to see its power in this novel. (Congruent belief is hardly necessary in art. I'm not a Catholic royalist, yet I think Evelyn Waugh's trilogy is the best fiction produced by World War II.)

"Existential" revolution, since 1967, has shown defects in dynamics, but Doctorow dramatizes the forces that produced it, along with the opposition to it—chiefly, the ingrained American hunger for innocence, a hunger that always gets vicious when frustrated. Fundamentally, the novel implies, the new revolution grew out of a break with a formal ideology that had its own innocence. Daniel's parents accepted the roles that society imposed on them in the prosecution; more, they accepted the roles that the Party imposed on them. (There is a masterly courtroom scene, imagined by Daniel, in which a mere exchange of glances reveals an intra-Party collusion.) The book chronicles a long break with acceptances, both conservative and radical. The end, the third and final ending, leaves the facts of the Isaacson case still mysterious for Daniel, but the forces that grew out of the radical past swerve until they reach the Columbia library-spring of 1968!-where he is writing.

E. L. Doctorow is forty, a former editor for book publishers, and the author of two previous novels that are not comparable with this work. His Book of Daniel is beautiful and harrowing, rhapsodic and exact. Like all good artists dealing with such subjects, Doctorow does not give answers but is not content only to pose questions. At one point Daniel says of his father: "He wrestled society for my soul." The line might be a motto for this fine book.