E.L. Doctorow

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E.L. Doctorow, Robert Coover

I wake to the news that E.L. Doctorow has died, and I feel a sense of loss that very few writers instill in me, particularly since I never met the man. But I’ve loved his work for very nearly forty years. No, that understates the case: I’ve been obsessed with his work for most of that time. I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on, his essays, his science fiction novel (which was never republished after its initial appearance in 1966), on the critical shelves behind me as I write this are two books of interviews with and essays on the man. I don’t love everything he wrote; two of his novels, City of God and the last, Andrew’s Brain, have a contemporary setting and I think they are his weakest (perhaps because of that). But others of his books are, I think, just about perfect.

Reprint: Postmodernism

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Brian McHale, Christine Brook-Rose, Christopher Priest, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Frederic Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, Iain Banks, James Joyce, John Fowles, Katherine Dunn, Kathy Acker, Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut, Laurence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Auster, Richard Jefferies, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, William Vollman

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one appeared in Vector 219, September-October 2001. As with the column on Modernism, my views are likely to have changed somewhat in the interim.

Making Up America: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter

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Bruce Olds, Charles S. Peirce, D.H. Lawrence, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, E.M. Forster, Gary Wills, Grover Cleveland, Harold Evans, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, John Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard, Owen Wister, Robert Coover, Robert Heinlein, Russell Banks, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, William Gibson, William James

This was one of those I wrote for no reason other than that I loved Russell Banks’s novel, Cloudsplitter (1998) so much. I think I did try sending it out once, though without any great expectation, and I briefly considered including it in my first collection of essays, but in truth the only place this ever appeared previously was in an apa. It’s an essay that grows out of my interest in the American Civil War, so there’s no science fiction here, but there is philosophy, which suggests a sort of continuity.