Word: novels
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...more of an ill-defined dream state that he doggedly revisits, working all the while to get the thing decoded. In his best books, like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow mixes historical figures with fictional characters to discover the submerged foundations of the American psyche. His spellbinding new novel, The March (Random House; 363 pages), is one to put beside those, a ferocious reimagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange...
...Sartorius seems a familiar name, it's because we first glimpsed him in Doctorow's 1994 novel The Waterworks, a story of murderous intrigues in early 20th century Manhattan. And among the freed slaves is Coalhouse Walker, whose son and namesake will rage at the center of Ragtime. You sense that with this work Doctorow is inviting us to regard his novels as a career-length meditation on more than a century of the American past, with its bloodshed and racial obsessions, its hallucinatory edges and its complicated freedoms. The March is a more straightforward book than Ragtime...
...debut novel, 2000's Bee Season, Myla Goldberg intricately etched four members of a contemporary Jewish family and set them in motion against one another, charting the repercussions of even their subtlest interactions. For her follow-up, the author changes tack completely, striving for the historical epic. In Wickett's Remedy (Doubleday; 336 pages), the travails of Lydia Kilkenny, a young woman from an impoverished Irish Catholic family, are rooted in such global events as World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic that left millions dead...
...chronicling of Lydia's struggles is rather straightforward, but it is only one element of the novel. At the end of each chapter, Goldberg drops in imagined conversations between soldiers on leave or on their way to war, passages from a QD Soda newsletter and letters Driscoll wrote in his old age that illuminate the unethical rise of his beverage empire. Additionally, she excerpts actual news stories of the day. Lastly, in the margins of each page are voices from the dead commenting on or clarifying plot points. For example, when, early in the book, Henry fails to appear...
...History of Violence: that might be the title of a sociological treatise on America and its films. Actually, it's the name of a smart new melodrama written by Josh Olson (from a well-known graphic novel) and made by director David Cronenberg. The movie sees gunplay infecting a series of peaceful small-town settings: a quiet motel, a friendly diner, the home of the most honorable citizen in Millbrook, Ind. He is Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), and he enjoys an idyllic life with his lovely, loving wife (Maria Bello) and their two kids. When Tom uses some surprisingly expert...