The book of daniel e.l.doctorow11/26/2022 ![]() ![]() Daniel, who remembers much more about his parents, is less sanguine about Susan’s cause, and the two split ways over it. With a trust established by the Old Left supporters of her parents, she tries to start an organization dedicated to revolutionary causes in their names. Susan, who was the younger of the two, and whose memories are far more fragmentary than those of her brother, is a full-throated supporter of the Isaacsons, believing them innocent. The formal historical analysis interrupts the narrative here and there, appearing as fragments.īoth children have been damaged by their parents’ death, but each take different paths. (It’s as if Daniel were writing in the genre of the New Journalism or something.) The reader gets certain glimmers of formal historical writing, but mostly as flashes of insight amid attempts to explain what befell his parents and more immediately, his sister Susan. ![]() One of the novel’s conceits is that the text, “The Book of Daniel” is his doctoral dissertation. He is writing an idiosyncratic history of his family and the Old Left. Susan and Daniel have taken adoptive parents’ names and live in anonymity, haunted by their birth parents’ infamous death at the hands of the American state.ĭaniel, the character from whose perspective the novel primarily appears, also happens to be a graduate student studying history at Columbia. After moving around from relatives and then to an orphanage, the children are eventually adopted by a liberal couple named the Lewins. Daniel and Susan, because of the infamy of their parents, encounter New and Old Left in ways that collapse the two into certain common tendencies of the radical imagination. The novel is fractured, jumping around between periods in time, from before the Isaacson’s arrest on conspiracy to commit treason, to the trial and its immediate aftermath, to years later in 1967 when the New Left and the counterculture had reached national notoriety. Doctorow names the condemned couple Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. The Book of Daniel is a fictional account of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the fallout from it, especially its effect on their children. ![]() Doctorow’s stunning novel The Book of Daniel (1971), and Alain Badiou’s idea of “the passion for the real” in his short work The Century (2007). Bouncing off a theme from Kurt Newman in his recent post about Bob Dylan and the Old and New Left, I’ve been thinking about two pieces of writing lately, E.L. ![]()
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