SWEET
LAND STORIES
By E.L. Doctorow
Random House 147 pp.
$22.95
Reviewed
by Kevin Baker
It would be easy to call E.L. Doctorow the preeminent writer of
historical fiction in America, but it would also be inaccurate.
For Doctorow has accomplished nothing in his long and distinguished
career, if not to illustrate just how flimsy and artificial the
walls of the literary ghetto that constitutes “historical
fiction” really are.
From
the doubt-haunted western, Welcome to Hard Times; to
his seminal recasting of the last turn of a century, Ragtime;
through his exquisite, quasi-memoir World’s Fair,
to the bold, spectral, The Waterworks —Doctorow
has succeeded as no one else has in tying our history to our present,
and our future. Like some wayward family pet, he has dug cheerfully,
even joyously away at our cozy, received notions of the American
past, laying the disturbing truths he has turned up brazenly on
our doorstep.
Now
the master is back with Sweet Land Stories, his first
collection of short fiction since he published the superb
Lives of the Poets twenty years ago. It is a slim volume,
only five stories in all—yet it illustrates as well as anything
Doctorow has ever written just how interchangeable our present
and our supposedly long buried past really are.
Doctorow
has tried his hand at contemporary fiction before—originally
in his brave, experimental Big As Life; more successfully
in his last novel, City of God—but here he is able
move seamlessly from one time to another. The first of these stories
is set a century or so in the past, the other four more or less
in the here and now, but all of them could be essentially anytime
in America. They are united by the sorts of marginal characters
who have always resided on the periphery of our civilization,
though the reasons for how they came to reside there differ greatly.
Doctorow’s protagonists include a pair of serial murderers,
a delusional young baby thief, a petty criminal and hustler; a
teenage wife, a member of a cult, a mentally fragile young heiress,
a disillusioned FBI agent.
And
all of them remain, each in their own, twisted ways, stubbornly
optimistic—a trait which marks them as distinctly American.
They scheme, steal, dare, plan, and improvise endlessly, still
convinced that they can find whatever they are looking for—money,
love, justice, a rationale for their own existence—somewhere
out in the sweet, vast, land. Physically, most them start out
west of the Mississippi, and tend to only slide farther west.
Even the addled young lovers in “Baby Wilson,” who
we first meet in some Los Angeles slum, manage to end up in Alaska—after
a quick detour to Las Vegas, the undisputed capital of all our
most tawdry dreams.
It
is Doctorow’s genius that he is not unsympathetic to even
the creepiest of their aspirations. One actually finds oneself
rooting for the murderous, mother-son duo in “A House on
the Plains,” the best story in the collection, and one that
speaks directly to the underside of the great American push westward,
and upward. Our history is spotted with chilling with just such
examples of how dangerous it can be to rely upon the kindness
of strangers—of the innocent-looking homestead out on the
prairie, or the bland house in a huge, anonymous new city like
Chicago, where all who entered in were never seen or heard of
again.
Doctorow’s
ability to create such an unlikely identification is due in no
small part to his expert use of an elusive, first-person narrator.
Semi-naïve, subtly disingenuous—not quite an unreliable
narrator per se, but a voice that one begins to suspect
is telling us exactly what we want to hear. This is a real high-wire
act, one that Doctorow employed to good effect in his hustlers’
novels, Loon Lake and Billy Bathgate, but he
has honed it near to perfection in three of the stories here.
He uses it both to build a sympathy for the hard-pressed hustler
in “Baby Wilson”—then to slowly pull it out
from under the feet of the lawyer-turned-cult-acolyte in “Walter
John Harmon.” It is, as well, a marvelous vehicle for Doctorow’s
typically clean, sparse prose, and the dry wit, the sheer ebullience
that have always served to leaven even his darkest creations.
The
two, third-person stories work less well, but they also demonstrate
the author’s fundamental empathy toward his characters.
If “Jolene: A Life,” reads something like a bad country-western
song, with one heart-wrenching cliche after another perpetrated
upon its young heroine, Doctorow seems to be suggesting that many
American lives are nothing but second acts today; an exhausting
treadmill of reinventions, recoveries, retrainings, marriages
and divorces.
Even
the weakest story here, “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden”—an
overly preachy tale about someone leaving the body of a child
on the White House grounds—succeeds in establishing both
how far Doctorow’s characters are from having any real effect
on the world they inhabit, and how stubbornly they refuse to admit
this. Can anyone today doubt that the administration in power
would react just as it does in the story—secretly burying
the body, threatening and harassing anyone who might leak the
story? Or that its troubled protagonist would feel so distant
from “the gentlemen who run things” that she laments,
“I just thought maybe this could restore them, put them
back among us.” Another American on the margins, still hoping
to be heard after all this time.
Kevin Baker is the author of the historical novels, Dreamland
and Paradise Alley.
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Copyright The Washington Post Company
