The Book of Daniel: A Novel (Paperback)

Doctorow displays an encyclopedic and detailed knowledge of both of those political periods, capturing the tone of the rhetoric, the pop music, the posters, the idealism, the hypocrisy, and the dilemmas confronting human beings caught up in political movements that seem more powerful than the people themselves. He is as unsparing in his treatment of sixties radicals as he is in his treatment of the cold government executioners who sent the Rosenbergs to their death.

One of most remarkable things about this book is the character of Daniel himself: sharply intelligent yet confused and conflicted, someone who sees all the angles yet cannot bring himself to act -- a modern-day Hamlet. The title's allusion to the biblical Daniel is reflected throughout the text in a number of clever ways as the narrative leaps between historical reflections, allegories, and vivid evocations of moments and events in the life of Daniel, his sister, and their families. It poignantly evokes the relationship between the two children and the various guardians who are assigned to care for them after society has arrested and executed their parents.

The other remarkable thing about this book is its use of language. Doctorow is a great prose stylist. To get an idea of how great he is, you should read both this book and Ragtime, which is a very different work. Ragtime is written in a style reminiscent of an old children's primer--simple, quaint sentences, gentle imagery. The Book of Daniel, by contrast, is full of incendiary language and is a very complex narrative full of jarring transitions -- language ideal, in other words, to capturing the feel of the political periods and events that are the subject of the book.

The narrative style of the novel is particularly noteworthy. The plot of the book is a finely woven quilt recalling the history of a mysterious leftist underbelly of America in the middle of the twentieth century, admirably portrayed by its personifications in Paul and Rochelle. Daniel, the oldest of two children, is a graduate student at Columbia. He is tormented by the cloudy, romantic, and tender memories of his parents; even more so is his sister, Susan, who is intermittently hospitalized in many asylums, never having been able to overcome the incarceration and execution of her innocently martyred parents. Revolutionary sentiment and action are cast in reverie in the Book of Daniel. However, the reverie turns nightmarish in the blink of an eye. Never can genuine, spirited opposition to exploitation, as poetically embodied in Paul and Rochelle, ever be fully suppressed, since the human will always strives toward justice, no matter how twisted the manifestations seem to others around us. Remember Rochelle's execution: The electric chair failed to kill her the first time; it had to be reactivated. "The renunciation of resistance is the ratification of regression." - Theodor Adorno