Word: doctorow
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FICTION: A Philip Roth Reader, Philip Roth ∙Crackers, Roy Blount Jr. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino ∙Loon Lake,E.L. Doctorow ∙Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits, Stanley Elkin ∙The Middle Ground, Margaret Drabble ∙The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty
FICTION: A Philip Roth Reader, Philip Roth ∙ Crackers, Roy Blount Jr. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino ∙ Loon Lake, E.L. Doctorow ∙ Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits, Stanley Elkin ∙ The Middle Ground, Margaret Drabble ∙ The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty
...DOCTOROW makes Joe more than a symbol, gives him blood and flesh and a life of trudgery to fight and conquer. And he gives him a friend and a lover. The lover is Clara Lukacs, a lurid beauty with creamy skin and silky hair, a mortician's daughter and a mobster's moll who escapes with Joe from the Great Depression. They can never run far enough; the depression overwhelms them, the world closes in until the glamorous doll is no more than a housewife in Jacksontown, Indiana, and the noble free-spirit is the headlight man on the assembly...
...failed poet who prints his own works, a baleful-eyed generous man, fatter than Warren Harding himself, a world-traveler, a peculiar sort of war hero, a Buddhist. Penfield twists the story; he exists in the first person at times, but these are Joe's versions of Penfield. And Doctorow dances between the future and the past. One moment Penfield is a coal miner's son from Seattle, the next he is a Caucasian gorilla probing the mysteries of Zen in a rice palace outside Tokyo. And Doctorow's prose switches just as quickly to poetry...
This is epic English in an awkward way. Doctorow's skill nearly carries it off, but it is a charade. Like his subject, it shows more form than content: mystical images without context, crackling plot without mystery. He manipulated us with Ragtime, made us believe what we saw. In reality, Doctorow is just another Houdini, a conjurer of words...