The American historical novelist E.L. Doctorow has spoken of the adventure of his process of composition, of the excitement of not knowing where he is going to end up. For a reader, too, the feeling of being searchingly led forward is one of the pleasures offered by his fiction. But another impression it gives is that the environment being explored comes ready structured. In the work of Dos Passos, historical circumstances tend to stifle human potential; in DeLillo they tend to gasify into all-permeating media representations; but in Doctorow they create a network of defining possibilities along which characters can advance.

LRB 11 February 2010 | PDF Download