On the (Secret) Crime Novels of E.L. Doctorow

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It’s almost impossible to think of E.L. Doctorow as underrated. His third novel The Book of Daniel propelled him into “the first rank of American writers,” in the words of New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and the sensational critical and public reaction to his follow-up book Ragtime ensured that he would stay there. He won major prizes for his novels, including two PEN/Faulkner Awards and a Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013. He received criticism for how he fictionalized historical figures, and not all his books were critical or commercial successes. But by the time Doctorow published his final novel Andrew’s Brain in 2014, a year before his death, the common consensus was, in the words of George Saunders, that he was “a national treasure.” In 2015, Former President Barack Obama paid tribute to Doctorow by calling him “one of America’s greatest novelists.”

But even adored novelists can have underappreciated strains in their legacies. Doctorow is justly acclaimed for his historical fiction, but not for how often said forays into historical fiction turned out to be crime stories. He filled his books with all sorts of scoundrels and depicted miscarriages of justice, the machinations and murders of gangsters, as well as a memorable investigation into a missing person.

Doctorow was adept at providing the pleasures of crime fiction, but he also sought to build upon its rock-solid foundations. Over the course of his over-half-a-century long career as a writer, Doctorow would reshape the crime novel into a form that depicted the wonders and horrors of human consciousness. One that was just as devoted to the internal problems in its protagonists’ minds as it was to the external problems common to the crime genre which they tried to solve. Doctorow portrayed how the minds of human beings’ function in highly individualistic ways, solve problems, and confront the specter that is the end of consciousness, which at least some of his characters tried to cheat. Doctorow’s crime fiction did this while delivering the expected thrills of the genre as well as those which come from Doctorow’s beautiful use of language. But Doctorow never let his genre’s insistence that he depict the exploits of private eyes distract him from portraying the inner workings of his main characters private Is.

One way Doctorow reshaped the crime novel in his more introspective image is through his use of protagonists who are fresh-faced outsiders to the criminal underworld. The protagonist of The Book of Daniel, which is about the investigation of a political mystery, is a twenty-five-year-old Ph.D. student who spends most of the novel writing his dissertation in Columbia University’s library. Billy Bathgate is about gangsters, including the real-life Dutch Schultz, but its titular protagonist is not a hardened killer. Instead, he is an exuberant teenager whose duties as a self-described “associate gang member” (namely getting coffee and cigarettes) make him more analogous to a modern intern than a cynical criminal.

Even The Waterworks, which uses the format of the mystery genre more faithfully than Doctorow’s other works, is narrated from the perspective of the editor of a newspaper rather than that of the hyper-competent policeman who helps him solve the case. Each of Doctorow’s main characters—including the cognitive scientist who is the titular character of Andrew’s Brain—could also add author to their list of occupations because all of these books function as a type of metatext that his protagonists write themselves, acts which draw attention to how their consciousness operates. Their high level of mental nimbleness helps Doctorow expand the idea of what a crime story protagonist can be and creates characters whose interior lives are worthy of exploration.

Doctorow often depicts consciousness through first-person narration, which appears in all his crime novels. He set the template for how crucial this technique would be to his type of highly individualistic interior crime novel with The Book of Daniel. Despite his protagonist’s bookish occupation, Doctorow frequently codes Daniel as a detective figure who is carrying out an investigation into the potential innocence of his Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-esque parents, Communists who were convicted and executed by the United States government when he was a child, for allegedly sending American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Daniel interviews people connected with what happened to his parents and his traumatized sister Susan in addition to trying to find evidence which he hopes will exonerate them. He even confronts a suspect.

Doctorow fully embraces the chaotic state of Daniel’s mind as he undertakes his hard-boiled quest. Throughout the novel Doctorow does not describe what happens to Daniel and his family in a linear fashion like in the novels of a more traditional crime writer such as Dashiell Hammett. Instead, his narration is nonlinear and chaotic. Daniel’s mind covers a wide amount of territory as it jumps from his childhood to his life as an adult, with many digressions on diverse subjects such as the history of the Soviet Union’s purges in the 1930s and the Socialist comic strips he used to read as a youth. This radical use of first-person narration is fitting for a novel about the lives of American radicals.

Other Doctorow novels use first-person narration to depict human consciousness in more subtle ways. He uses what he referred to in an interview with Terry Gross as “looping, long sentences” to convey the optimistic and ebullient point-of-view through which Bathgate sees the world. He is the type of character who can find beauty in the way a gangster accountant fixes a series of horse races or in the “fireworks of flowers” he uses to protect Schultz’s girlfriend Drew. Doctorow also accentuates Bathgate’s youth by having him frequently refer to the people he works for not by their colorful nicknames such as “Dutch” or “Abbadabba,” but as “Mr. Schultz” or “Mr. Berman.” But those most memorable qualities of his viewpoint—his juvenile joy and low-status association with the Schultz Gang—also distance him from being a full member of the criminal world which he admires. In addition, his youthful sensory delight in every detail provides a chilling juxtaposition to the increasingly brutal acts of violence Bathgate will witness as a part of his time with “the big murdering gangsters of [his] life and times.”

In contrast to Bathgate’s ebullient and youthful way of interacting with his surroundings and superiors, the 19^th century newspaperman McIlvaine in The Waterworks takes a cynical view of the world around him. He frequently decries the corruption around him and only takes on the case of finding Martin Pemberton, a missing freelance writer (a profession McIlvaine describes as consisting mostly of “nervous craven creatures,” which I can tell you from personal experience has not changed since the 19th century) less out of a desire for Pemberton to be safe and more out of a desire to keep the notoriety his caustic criticism brings for his newspaper. But while Doctorow is true to the rich world of his protagonists, he frequently uses a method of “passing the mic” from them to supporting characters who give long monologues, such as the energetically profane New Left activist Artie Sternlicht from The Book of Daniel as well as the fearsome Schultz and his doomed lieutenant Bo Weinberg in Billy Bathgate. The dramatic change in their language provides fascinating windows into the worlds of their consciousness.

Doctorow accentuate these interior worlds of his characters through their exterior lives. Often, that exterior world is Doctorow’s beloved home state of New York. But Doctorow subverts the way it is depicted in crime stories by exploring underrepresented aspects of its status as a crime mecca. In particular, he subverts the genre’s reliance on big cities like New York City by setting a large portion of Billy Bathgate upstate. He mines great comedy from the culture clash of his colorful gangsters and the genteel residents of Onondaga, as well as beautiful descriptions of the countryside as viewed by Bathgate, whose eyes practically pop at their wonders. In contrast to the bucolic beauties of Billy Bathgate, Doctorow is unafraid to look away from the horrors of an 1871 version of his hometown in The Waterworks. Some of the most vivid parts of the novel consist of McIlvaine’s musings on post-Civil War New York City, from his depiction of the corrupt Tweed Ring as a vast specter which haunts the city like smog, or the brutal newsboys who use violence to get ahead in a way that would make the sunny children from the Disney musical Newsies weep with fear. But at the same time, he cannot ignore McIlvaine’s admiration for his “roaring, teeming city,” and the stories he gathers from it to present to the world as his life’s work.

Doctorow never fails to depict human consciousness as a marvel, and the greatest crimes in his novels are the ones his characters commit against it. The most grotesque crime in The Book of Daniel is not the one his parents allegedly commit, but the horrific electrocution which destroys their minds and lives. Doctorow depicts most of the activities of the Schultz gang in Billy Bathgate as just another business, which is fitting when you realize that the real-life version of his character Berman is commonly thought to have coined the phrase “Nothing personal; it’s just business.” But the violence still stands out, such as when Billy writes that one of Schultz’s murders was a “sudden subtraction from the universe of a life,” or when a shooting leaves Schultz wounded and chaotically babbling a fictionalized version of his famous last words.

But the greatest crime in Doctorow’s work is what happens when human beings tamper with consciousness. The most prominent example is from The Waterworks, an homage of sorts to the work of Edgar Allan Poe (for whom Doctorow was named) and a favorite of Ta-Nehisi Coates (who adored a passage from its ninth chapter so much that he had to shake his head and declare it “incredible” while reading aloud from it at an event honoring Doctorow posthumously). The plot of The Waterworks centers on McIlvaine’s search for Pemberton, who disappeared after claiming to see his dead father. What Pemberton, and later McIlvaine, discover is that the late Augustus Pemberton and a cabal of wealthy men paid the hyper-competent Dr. Sartorius to make them immortal. But while Dr. Sartorius’s experiments on his “league of immortals” succeed, they drastically lower his patients’ level of consciousness. They become “creatures” unable to speak or think, trapping them in a state like those afflicted with Alzheimer’s or a severe form of dementia. The crimes of the Tweed Ring, which bankrolls Dr. Sartorius’s research, pale in comparison to this act which violates both the laws of nature and the unique status of human consciousness.

It is fitting then that Doctorow’s final novel, Andrew’s Brain, is devoted to warning against a potential and more grievous violation of human consciousness. Near the end of that novel—which deals with the slippery nature of consciousness in a way Doctorow hadn’t done since The Book of Daniel—the titular cognitive scientist tells the President of the United States of America (who is also his former college roommate) to not pursue construction of machines which could result in computers and genetically-altered animals which could think as people do, because they would bring about “the end of the mythic human world… and all the stories we’ve told ourselves until now.” Doctorow himself endorsed this warning in one of his final interviews because he believed that such machines would destroy “the idea of the exceptionalism of the human mind.” He may one day be proven right, but it is still too early to make sense of his warning. Ron Rosenbaum, the journalist who conducted this interview, viewed it with skepticism because he thought that such a machine, unlike Doctorow, could not “write something with the power to make you cry.”

Whatever the case, if such a machine could replicate human consciousness, it is intriguing to imagine what it would make of Doctorow’s writing.

That super-machine might react emotionally to the way Daniel’s rage ultimately dissolves into pity for the one person who was more responsible than any for the pain which has blighted his life. Or, if it has acquired a sense of humor, that super-machine might make the cyber equivalent of laughter at Billy’s exuberant descriptions of his life as a teenage gangster and his rollicking misadventures getting coffee and donuts for hardened criminals. Said super-machine might even light up with admiration for the final paragraphs of The Waterworks, in which McIlvaine imagines the city he has hated and adored for so long, the closest thing that he has to a great love in his life, freezing so he can slowly savor every single detail of it. It is just as likely that the super-machine might prefer the work of other authors, or not enjoy Doctorow’s work. But if it really did have a consciousness like a human, it would probably find something to enjoy in Doctorow’s crime stories. The writing, with its exquisite examinations of what it means to think and delightful depictions of what a mind can do, is just too good to ignore.

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