His father was a barely competent radio repair man. He throws in historical insights, commentary and facts that echo the then-current "new journalism", but he is at his best when he shifts between Daniel's confusion of memories, shuffling the present with the vague recollections of his family. It is not just the fictionalising of such a notable case that makes this novel risky, but the way that Doctorow shuffles his material. His younger sister, less caught up in the memories of the past, but in some ways more affected by them, becomes radicalised, wants their trust fund (money provided to give a future to these two innocents) to become a fighting fund in her parents' name. It is not just that the execution of his parents took away childhood but its also took away any agency over his future. His darkness comes out in his sexual relations with her, or in the speed at which he drives his car. His young wife has been learning to be a hippy, but her attraction to him is sexual. He talks at one point of how he will always be made politically impotent because of who he is - he cannot join the draft, they will reject him at some point, he cannot be a rebel, the parental stain as "traitors" would taint any course he associates with. He is trying to make sense of his life, and the legacy he has been left.
His surrogate parents are a middle class couple whom he cannot quite resent, but cannot love unfailingly. His younger sister - we discover - has gone off the rails and has been taken into a facility for the mentally ill. He is recently married - unsuitably - and has a small child. Daniel's narrative slips from first to third person mid-paragraph. Doctorow shifts frequently between timeframes and perspectives. Instead of two sons they have a son and a daughter, and it is through the son's eyes, in a near present of 1967, that we hear the story. But this is a fiction despite its closeness in memory. Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are close corollaries to the Rosenbergs, and parts of the actual case (and execution) are repeated. America's young were now longer deferential to a state apparatus that could send them to die for a meaningless war in a far off land.ĭoctorow takes considerable risks on every page. Little more than a generation after it had taken place, America was in the latest of its proxy wars with Communism, via Vietnam. Mentioned at the start of Plath's "The Bell Jar" this 1953 state double-execution left a long shadow, especially as later testimony would indicate Ethel's innocence of the charges against her.
state for passing nuclear secrets to Russia was the high point (low point) of America's paranoia about the far left. The execution of the Rosenbergs by the U.S. Doctorow's 1970 novel, "The Book of Daniel", he takes a historical (though recent) case and creates a fictionalisation. In Britain a socialist government, creating not the revolutionary state of the far left, but a social settlement, a welfare state in America, the victors of the war in a political sense, seeing the allied Russia becoming a real and ideological enemy, with McCarthyism requiring a rationale. As Europe was divided, the ideologically divide that had placed Communism in direct opposition to Fascism - a left and a right - was mirrored in some ways in the post-war settlements. The axis of power that had shifted with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki heralded the new age, of nuclear threat and opposing super powers. In the post-war carving up of Europe, lines were drawn between the victors, with Germany cut in two, a Soviet side, that became East Germany and a French-British-American side. What happens when a democratic state goes after its own citizens - even to the point of executing them? How do we react? How are the survivors affected? The culpability of the state in a person's life is often the subject of writers from authoritarian regimes.