That is one way of putting things, and I don’t think it’s wrong-but finally it is not what interests me. P Morgan’s library and bringing a city to a standstill that composite image out of Heinrich von Kleist and the Black Panther Party. It was not the America of Pynchon and DeLillo: the global death cult of oil and commerce and world politics and its map was correspondingly smaller, delimited to the spatial passions of a localism now and then capable of resisting the larger national abstractions. ![]() But I cannot think of another major novelist of his generation who had less to say about the function of America as an imperium, and who so contentedly refused to offer cognitive maps of its guiding role in the forces of globalization.ĭoctorow’s America was whatever was left of FDR’s New Deal, battered and parceled out and sold to the highest bidder or it was what made the New Deal necessary in the first place: vicious corporate monopolies, union-bashing, tycoons, and so on. His America, of course, extends to Los Angeles upon occasion (in Ragtime, Andrew’s Brain and The Book of Daniel), dips into the mid-West (in Loon Lake), sweeps through the South (in The March), and even attempts a vision of the South-West frontier in Welcome to Hard Times. These rare exceptions apart, indeed, Doctorow’s fiction cleaves stubbornly to the American landmass and compulsively re-maps those locales to which he was particularly drawn: the Bronx, Manhattan, and New Rochelle. My first hunch in thinking about this paper was that Doctorow is perhaps the most relentlessly American of the great American novelists since Twain, that his spatial repertoire is, particularly in contrast with Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace, an exceptionally narrow one, dwelling almost exclusively within the continental United States, with two significant exceptions: Warren Penfield’s sojourn in 1920s Japan in Loon Lake, and the geographical outliers of Ragtime-Hamburg, Rome, Mexico, and the North Pole. This paper was the keynote address at a recent University of Sydney symposium devoted to Doctorow’s work. ![]() Doctorow Historical Archives and Digital Collections.Īmerican author E.L. Image of the New Rochelle community from the E.L.
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