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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A number of readers, including this one, had a problem with E. L. Doctorow's best-known and best-selling novel, "Ragtime" (1975). Brilliantly written in a ricky-ticky ragtime prose, the book not only mingled the American celebrities of 1902 (Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan) with the typical and the obscure (the narrator's upper-middle-class New Rochelle family, the tenement-dwelling Jewish artist Tateh and his daughter) but had the historical figures do things and achieve conjunctions that never transpired--the rich killer Harry Thaw stripping naked and banging his penis between the bars of his cell at the Tombs while Houdini watches, radical Emma Goldman relieving scandalous Evelyn Nesbit of her corset and giving her a loving oil massage. It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game. Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence. His novels and short stories generally seek the shelter of a bygone period in which to take root; when they are set in the present, like "City of God" (2000), an imp of modernist experimentation and fantasy goes wild. Even his tenderest, most autobiographical, and least souped-up work, "The World's Fair" (1985), builds to a climactic scene in which naked women underwater are molested by Oscar the Amorous Octopus. His recent collection, "Sweet Land Stories" (2004), held five stories--four of them published in this magazine--that, like his novella "The Waterworks" (1994) and the prize-winning novel "Billy Bathgate" (1989), tingle with their injections of the murderous and the macabre.
His splendid new novel, "The March" (Random House; $29.95), pretty well cures my Doctorow problem. A many-faceted recounting of General William Tecumseh Sherman's famous, and in some quarters still infamous, march of sixty-two thousand Union soldiers, in 1864-65, through Georgia and then the Carolinas, it combines the author's saturnine strengths with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy. The novel shares with "Ragtime" a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book's distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts;...
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