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The Book of Daniel: A Novel
E.L. Doctorow
Random House Trade Paperbacks
July 2007
On Sale: July 10, 2007
320 pages
ISBN: 081297817X
EAN: 9780812978179
Paperback
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Fiction
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose
parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic
secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his
parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long
time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a
new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of
his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that
enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where
he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel
composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with
his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan,
whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to
the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching
the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at
rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his
mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s
interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew
about them; and logging his strange researches and
discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—
lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson
family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand-
mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the
McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a
book that spans the quarter-century of American life since
World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left
politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its
peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a
book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of
childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence,
and about the relations of people to nations.
It is The Book of Daniel.
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