Doctorow's Promise

by Benjamin DeMott

LOON LAKE (Random House, $11.95) is E. L. Doctorow’s first novel since Ragtime, the seventies’ smash hit in American fiction. Unlike its predecessor, the new book has both a hero and a second banana—Ragtime had neither— and its substance consists of loosely related episodes from their (for the most part) separately lived lives. The hero is Joseph Korzeniowski, “born to a working-class family Paterson New Jersey August 2 1918,” who lights out after high school in a fury of ambition for himself and contempt for his parents, does time as a hobo and carnival roustabout, finds his way to Loon Lake, an Adirondacks preserve owned by a hugely rich car magnate, and at length steals from the owner not only a girl and a Mercedes-Benz coupe (fendermounted spares) but a destiny as well. The most intensely probed period in Joe’s life is his service as an assemblyline worker in an autobody plant in Jacksontown, Indiana; we see him at work (the scenes recall Modern Times), attending forbidden union meetings, trying devotedly to amuse the beautiful but vacuous stolen girl, while registering with extreme anxiety proliferating indications that the defrauded magnate has him under remorseless scrutiny and is about to strike back. (Loon Lake is correctly billed by its publisher as part road novel, part thriller, part bildungsroman.)

The second banana, Warren Penfield, “poet in residence” on the same Adirondacks preserve—former signal corpsman in World War I, koan-seeker in a Zen monastery, adviser on manners to Anglophile Japanese businessmen—belongs to another generation. But he too is of the working class (Colorado miners), and he’s therefore kind to young Joe when the latter is placed under house arrest at Loon Lake for trespassing. (Penfield introduces the errant lad to wine, poetry, and the pleasure of being treated as an honorable man, and eventually abets his thievery and escape.) The most intensely probed period of Penfield’s life is the day of the general strike in Seattle in 1919, during which he’s swept up in a vision of universal human solidarity that he is subsequently obliged to relinquish.

The acquaintance of these two figures is brief, to be sure, and it’s a connection that lacks definition, Penfield not quite qualifying as mentor, surrogate parent, or friend, and the characters’ respective fates—despite several coincidentally parallel life situations— not really being intertwined. (Penfield, born in 1899, dies in 1937 on an aroundthe-world airplane voyage; in that same year, we learn from the biographical note with which the book concludes, Joe, aged nineteen, ascends from the assembly line to the freshman class at Williams; after pauses in the Air Corps and the OSS, and a career in the CIA, he achieves ambassadorial rank, the chairmanship of a foundation begun by the car magnate, and the title of “master of Loon Lake.”) But that these lives are somewhat too easily nudged into adjacency doesn’t signify that either lacks insides. Joe and Warren aren’t mere symptoms or props or proofs— evidence of social injustice or American fatuity or the meaninglessness of history. And this sets them off sharply from Father, Mother, Younger Brother, J. P. Morgan, Houdini, and the others—even Coalhouse Walker—who populate the book that made Doctorow a household word.

One starts with comparisons to Ragtime because of the nature of the issues that record best seller left in its wake. An original blend of the languages of history, journalism, and fiction, Ragtime showed us Freud and Jung traversing the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island, and Emma Goldman transforming Evelyn Nesbit into a bra-burner. It also attempted to establish that America in the sunny first decade of this century (the age hallowed by Meet Me in St. Louis and The Music Man) was some sort of obscenity. And for a while it stimulated ecstasy in both the popular and the highbrow press. (“. . . as joyous as a happy love affair”: Cosmopolitan. “These historical images . . . reflect all that is most significant and dramatic in America’s last hundred years or so”: New York Times. “A unique and beautiful work of art”: Saturday Review. “. . . spectacular. . . . No one has written a book quite like Ragtime”: New York Review of Books.)

But the second wave of attention paid the book was filled with doubt—doubt of the kind that intensifies interest in what an author undertakes next. Yes, said the re-evaluators of Ragtime, this is highly readable, admirably diverting stuff, but it’s also, alas, superficial—all surface, style, and shtik. Where are the people? Where are the feelings? Doesn’t the unremitting knowingness and sardonic irony squeeze the life out of everybody in sight, “real” or imagined? Won’t the author soon need to prove that he can create at a level richer than that of the grotesque, the political allegory, the comic bit? (The chief framers of these questions were Greil Marcus in The Village Voice, Richard Todd in The Atlantic, Maureen Howard in the Yale Review, and Jonathan Raban in Encounter.) The attack on Doctorow made much not only of the glossy, hard-edged, inhumane quality of Ragtime but also of certain troubling aspects of the author’s earlier work— his bland acceptance of the conventions of the western in Welcome to Hard Times, his strict left orthodoxy in The Book of Daniel, about the son of an American Jewish couple executed for espionage. The attackers drummed away insistently on the theme that character as traditionally understood was invisible in this writer’s books. And at a crucial point in the developing discussion, Doctorow himself seemed to validate such talk by declaring his impatience with the constrictions of individual human feeling. “I want to break out,” he told an interviewer, “of the little world of personal experience which has bound the novel, to escape that suffocating closeness to the characters.”

Thus are Critical Issues born.

By granting its central figures a measure of independent being, Loon Lake clearly takes a step toward resolving the issues. The narrator of Ragtime enclosed and suspended the entire cast in his own uncommitted, offhand mockery. (“As it happened Houdini’s unexpected visit interrupted Mother and Father’s coitus.”) The storytelling in the new book shuttles between first person and third person, offering intermittently an illusion of intimacy with the characters, suggesting the sound of their voices as they converse with themselves, allowing them more than once to name their feelings. As Penfield reads his verse aloud, Joe, the young intruder at the lake, reflects that his words:

. . . seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard ... I heard the feeling they inspired in me, that I was living at last!... I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity, the boon of himself which granted me without argument everything I was struggling for, all of it assumed in the simple giving of words, so moving to this scruffy boy.

The spirit of Satire survives in Loon Lake but now it breathes in freestanding figures close at hand, rather than in some unreachable literary manipulator of stereotypes and silhouettes. Hobo Joe, recuperating in the car magnate’s guesthouse after being attacked by guard dogs, is shown the guest book by a friendly servant. “Charles Chaplin . . . had written ‘Splendid weekend! Gay company!’ . . . Some of the people there were such big shots they needed only one name to identify themselves. Leopold, one of them had written. Of Belgium.” Joe distracts the maid’s eye, uncaps a fountain pen, and puts his own stamp on the next line of this treasured artifact of the rich: “ ‘Joe,’ I wrote. ‘Of Paterson. Splendid dogs. Swell company.’ ” Clara, a minor character, daughter of a funeral parlor operator with a Mafia clientele, remembers believing as a child that “anyone who was dead had to have a hole in them.”

Nor is the spirit of Satire and Humor the only human spirit that’s alive in these pages. There’s room for affection for place (the Adirondacks lake is brilliantly evoked), and emotions that are downright heartening turn up at intervals. The longest patch of sustained narrative is about Joe’s friendship with a fellow assembly-line worker who is beaten to death as a company spy; Joe’s anguish for the man and his wife is vividly drawn. And while brutal passages occur (a gang rape of a carnival Fat Lady named Fanny, for example, which brings to mind Hubert Selby’s appalling “Tra-la-la”), the worst of them is lighted at least for an instant by a daringly protective human impulse:

. . . another rube was moving forward for his turn. I jumped him just as he unbuckled his belt. I knocked him down and kicked him in the groin. He yowled, doubling up and clutching himself and I took his place crouching beside Fanny, facing them all, my fists clenched.

The modish affectlessness of Ragtime that vexed me (and many second-wave commentators) is banished from these sentences.

From these sentences—but not by any means from the whole of Loon Lake. Never for longer than a chapter at a stretch does one completely forget that this is an author who has pronounced closeness to character to be “suffocating.” In the same breath in which Joe of Paterson declares, “I was feeling Penfield’s immense careless generosity,” he attempts to detach himself from that response as though it were sentimental—something “moving” only to “this scruffy boy.” Barely a moment after springing to the defense of Fanny, Joe is inexplicably berating her as an animal. (“I felt betrayed by her, as by life itself, the human pretense. I became enraged with her!”)

And other signs of unease with purities of feeling abound. By scrambling the narrative sequences and illogically shifting point of view, Doctorow repeatedly shatters ordinary securities of comprehension and identification. History and Great Personages of Yesteryear are less obtrusive than in Ragtime, but the author still relishes the Big Event—a mine massacre or general strike—that dwarfs the individual human presence, and he’s still fond of the slotted-in, Dos Passos-like curriculum vitae that joltingly objectifies a character:

Lucinda Bailey Bennett born 1896 Philadelphia PA. Father US Undersecretary of State Bangwin Channing under McKinley. Private tutoring in France and Switzerland. Miss Morris’ School For Young Women. Brearly. Long Island School of Aviation practicing stalls tailspins stalled glide halfroll snap roll slow roll rolling eight wingovers Immelmann loops.

Time and again we’re bidden by tags or sermons to consider the thesis that “character” is a dead idea and that human motives are impenetrable. It’s held that this or that overwhelming contemporary force—war or whatever—“disestablishes human character,” and that great art aims to “disintegrate the human idea.” Brooding on a Japanese puppet performance, Warren Penfield praises it as a mirror of his own sense of nonexistence: “. . . yes it’s exactly true, when I speak I hear someone else saying the words when I decide to do something someone else is propelling me . . . how true what genius to make a public theater out of this.”

Far more consequential, Loon Lake is, like Ragtime, style-ridden from start to finish. Pages of pretentious verse succeed eruptions of Dos Passosian journalese. And the book seems absorbed in its own pell-mellness hurtling forward breathless forget pauses full stops speed limits go go go:

I grew up in a dervish spin of health and sickness [says Joe] and by the time I was fifteen everything was fine, I knew my life and I made it work, I raced down alleys and jumped fences a few seconds before the cops, I stole what I needed and went after girls like prey, I went looking for trouble and was keen for it, I was keen for life, I ran dowm the street to follow the airships sailing by, I climbed firescapes and watched old women struggle into their corsets, I joined a gang and carried a penknife I had sharpened like an Arab, like a Dago, I stuck it in the vegetable peddler’s horse, I stuck it in a feeh with a watermelon head, I slit awnings with it, I played peg with it, I robbed little kids with it, I took a girl on the roof with it and got her to take off her clothes with it. I only wrnnted to be famous!

One admires the pace, brightness, raciness, hut one notices, well before the end, an effect of homogenization: the voice of the poet Penfield shouldn’t resemble so closely that of Joe of Paterson. And the homogenization of voice has as its counterpart, not surprisingly, an attempted flattening—or neutralization—of emotion itself. In one passage Joe asserts that love isn’t “a feeling at all hut a simple characterless state of shared isolation ... a kind of neutral constancy.” Truth of mood proffered as general truth.

In sum: the new Doctorow is good news and bad news. In Loon Lake there are openings outward toward the human that give the book a freshness— a sweetness, even—that’s absent from Ragtime. But there’s a stiffness—an embarrassment about attachment— that regularly edges the book away from its own emerging best self.

My hope for this writer is that he has chosen a shrewd and secret mission, that of seducing anti-novelists and related Lilliputians—by degrees—out of their conventional scorn for human scale. In one possible scenario E. L. Doctorow, novelist with an unfashionable yet luckily disguisable passion for eccentric, subtle, ponderable, slowly forming individual response, insinuates himself skillfully into the alien camp of those who hate such response (enthusiasts of Donald Barthelme . . . the subscription list of People . . . swarms who hunger for special effects on giant screens). After winning their confidence by seeming to be, unequivocally, one of them, Doctorow slyly commences, in new work, dubbing in the human, cell by cell —nuance here, echo of emotion there, nothing noisy, all lightness and allusion. His reputation keeps the crowd in his grip, and before the change is cottoned to, before anyone realizes what’s been happening, the Great Audience finds itself back in the fold, once again “into” reading, bored with flipping from cartoon to cartoon— once again experiencing and treasuring deep, imaginative engagement.

This is fanciful, true, hut thinking along these lines clarified for me Loon Lake’s proper claim. The book warrants the label—and the regard—often bestowed on first works by writers who subsequently achieve international fame as innovators. It’s a novel of genuine promise.