| Review: E.L. Doctorow, Sweet Land Stories |
| In “Child, Dead, In The Rose Garden”,
the final story of E.L. Doctorow’s Sweet
Land Stories, a line reads, “Whatever his motives, it
was a fact that he’d spent his life contending with deviant
behavior, and only occasionally wondering if some of it was not justifiable.”
Meaning…what? That every once in a while this character considered
some deviant behavior justified? That usually he considered most deviant
behavior not justified? Or that usually, he simply didn’t consider
at all whether deviant behavior was justified or not justified...
Ponder it. You’ll begin to feel yourself falling into a maze. Read Sweet Land Stories and you find yourself falling into a maze, as well. A maze of lives you’d rather avoid. Lives where ghastly choices have been made. Or where choice has been removed and replaced by powerlessness. Or where choice seems nothing more than another illusion in a sea of illusions. Of liberty? Oh yes. Enough liberty to be narcissistically calculating, deluded, cynical. Enough liberty to be broken and left to find your own fix. The stories in this collection brought to mind Doctorow’s first novel, Welcome To Hard Times – a book that smashed any residual fantasies I may have still harbored about the Wild West thanks to Roy and Dale and Jingles and the Maverick brothers. Doctorow’s west was a place so primitive, it evoked the id and suppressed the superego. And it is the id that is evoked again in Sweet Land Stories. But that’s not to say that the characters in these stories are simplistic. On the contrary, their capacities, their desires, their expectations and frustrations are complex. And Doctorow’s intelligence, his impeccable technique, his mastery of the craft make each story multifaceted and affecting. The characters live. You’ll remember them. Some are coolly and unimaginatively evil. Others are victims who only flail at life. Some yearn, and almost get what they want, while others settle for what they don’t want at all or for something they’d never planned for. There is one character, just one, who acts courageously, a final bit of light flickering against the idea that each future beyond the last page of each story will not be much prettier than its past or present. One comes away from Sweet Land Stories slightly chilled, the characters Doctorow has grouped into this slim book being not the finest examples of the human species. But then, you wonder, who is? For in real life, we’ve been amply reminded lately on every front page that human beings, decency, and reasonable behavior don’t necessarily go hand in hand. To read Doctorow is to avoid simplicity. To read these stories is to be reminded that we are marginally prepared to face a civil society and that more often than not, we grasp blindly and badly. To read Sweet Land Stories is to explore the liberty to be deviant and wonder if it is ever not justifiable.
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