Also in this Issue
- Between Planets Let the heroine carry the big gun: Seven local women writers talk about creating their own worlds- and the problems with life on earth (Arts Feature)
- American Stars and Bars Kelman and Doctorow on boozehounds and babykillers (Books Roundup)
- More articles from this issue...
More Books Roundup Articles
- David Grossman: Someone to Run With (Feb 25, 2004)
- David Markson: Vanishing Point (Feb 4, 2004)
- Martin Amis: Yellow Dog (Oct 29, 2003)
- Carlo Rotella: Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Sep 3, 2003)
- Adama: Turki al-Hamad (Sep 3, 2003)
- B.H. Fairchild: Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Jun 4, 2003)
- Kenzaburo Oe: Somersault (Jun 4, 2003)
- Eric Shade: Eyesores (May 28, 2003)
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E.L. Doctorow: Sweet Land Stories
Image: Nancy Crampton
Sweet Land Stories
Random House
A bad seed lurks in the American soil and E.L. Doctorow has seen it take root. From his 1961 debut, Welcome to Hard Times, to the 1989 blockbuster, Billy Bathgate, Doctorow has explored how innocent dreamers warp toward the criminal life. In his latest collection, Sweet Land Stories, Doctorow hauls this preoccupation out to the high lonesome prairies, conjuring a cast of religious visionaries and orphans on the lam.
If the characters here share any quality, it is their singular belief in motion. In "A Home on the Plains," a teenage son and his widowed mother move from Chicago to a brick farmhouse and proceed to fleece prospective suitors. The landscape seems to egg them on. As the narrator says, "I was by now thinking I could wrest some hope from the loneliness of the farm with views of the plains as far as you could see." After their plan has born its awful fruit, they torch their prairie idyll and hit the road again.
Motion brings both escape and redemption in Sweet Land Stories, but not in the spiritual sense. In "Baby Wilson" a man's girlfriend suddenly abducts a baby from the hospital. Rather than bring the tot back, the man shoves everyone into his SUV and lights out for the highway. He dumps the car, gets a new one, and procures a few stolen credit cards before he even questions whether he's doing the right thing.
In the past, Doctorow's characters wrestled with good and evil, but here they leave the moral baggage by the side of the road. They are pragmatists first and will do whatever it takes to get what they want. When one character's firstborn is stolen from her by an abusive husband, she coldly considers killing the lout before she realizes that doing so would ensure she'd never see the baby again.
In the final two stories, Doctorow explores what happens when this kind of lethal pragmatism takes on the mantle of righteousness. In "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," an FBI deputy fights a presidential administration that is trying to cover up the chilling spectacle of the child Bush left behind. Though Doctorow overplays his hand here, the message is clear. America is great when it allows people to strive, achieve, and re-create themselves as necessary. Sweet Land Stories paints a grim portrait of what happens when those birthrights are abused.
About John Freeman
From the Archive
- Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands: Selected, translated, and introduced by J.M. Coetzee (Books - Apr 7, 2004)
- How Green Was My Lawn? To be middle-aged and miserable in the suburbs: Chang-Rae Lee's 'Aloft' (Books - Mar 10, 2004)
- Can't Pee Straight Graham Robb uncovers the many mysteries of being gay in the 19th century (Books - Jan 28, 2004)
- The Scarlet Kegger What did Nathaniel Hawthorne have to feel so guilty about? (Books - Dec 10, 2003)
- Hate is a Family Value Toni Morrison suggests that nothing brings women together like a good grudge (Books - Nov 19, 2003)
- Uzbekistan on No Dollars a Day 'Chasing the Sea' is a postcard sent from a new wasteland (Books - Oct 22, 2003)
- Carlo Rotella: Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Books Roundup - Sep 3, 2003)
- Our Man In Botswana A failing marriage, a lousy CIA assignment, and an AIDS crisis add up to a novel as big as a country (Books - Jun 18, 2003)
- More articles from the John Freeman Archive...
