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E. L. Doctorow

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The Book of Daniel: A Novel Paperback – July 10, 2007

by E.L. Doctorow (Author)

3.9 513 ratings

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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.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

July 10, 2007
Dimensions

5.17 x 0.7 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

081297817X
ISBN-13

978-0812978179
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A ferocious feat of the imagination . . . Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole–the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating.”
–Newsweek

“A nearly perfect work of art, and art on this level can only be a cause for rejoicing.”
–Joyce Carol Oates

“This is an extraordinary contemporary novel, a stunning work.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“The political novel of our age . . . the best work of its kind.”
–New Republic

“Remarkable . . . One of the finest works of fiction.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Stirring, brilliant, very moving.”
–Houston Post

About the Author

E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, Homer & Langley, and Andrew’s Brain. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction. In 2014 he was honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On Memorial Day in 1967
Daniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Mass., in just under five hours. With him was his young wife, Phyllis, and their eight-month-old son, Paul, whom Daniel carried in a sling chair strapped to his shoulders like a pack. The day was hot and overcast with the threat of rain, and the early morning traffic was wondering—I mean the early morning traffic was light, but not many drivers could pass them without wondering who they were and where they were going.

This is a Thinline felt tip marker, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products, Inc. This is Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browsing Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder. Outside this paneled room with its book-lined alcoves is the Periodical Room. The Periodical Room is filled with newspapers on sticks, magazines from round the world, and the droppings of learned societies. Down the hall is the Main Reading Room and the entrance to the stacks. On the floors above are the special collections of the various school libraries including the Library School Library. Downstairs there is even a branch of the Public Library. I feel encouraged to go on.

Daniel, a tall young man of twenty-five, wore his curly hair long. Steel-rimmed spectacles and a full mustache, brown, like his hair, made him look if not older than he was then more self-possessed and opinionated. Let’s face it, he looked cool, deliberately cool. In fact nothing about his appearance was accidental. If he’d lived in the nineteen thirties and came on this way he would be a young commie. A cafeteria commie. He was dressed in a blue prison jacket and dungarees. His Brooklyn-born wife was nineteen, with long straight natural blond hair worn this day in braids. She came to his shoulder. She wore flower bellbottoms and a khaki rain poncho and carried a small bag with things for the baby. As a matter of principle she liked to talk to strangers and make them unafraid, and although Daniel hadn’t wanted her to come along, he was glad he relented. The rides came quickly. She talked for him while he stared out the window. Cars, he noticed, were very big and wide and soft. The people who drove them were not fearful but patronizing. They were inquisitive and obviously entertained to be driving these young American kids who probably smoked marijuana even though they had a baby.

At about one o’clock they were let off at Route 9 in Worcester, a mile or so from their destination. They were looking up a long steep hill. At the crest of the hill, too far away to see, were the gates of Worcester State Hospital. Daniel had never been here but his father’s directions were precise. Daniel’s father was a law professor at Boston College forty miles to the east.

He didn’t like my marrying Phyllis, neither did my mother, but of course they wouldn’t say anything. Enlightened liberals are like that. Phyllis, a freshman dropout, has nothing for them. Liberals are like that too. They confuse character with education. They don’t believe we’ll live to be beautiful old people with strength in one another. Perhaps they sniff the strong erotic content of my marriage and find it distasteful. Phyllis is the kind of awkward girl with heavy thighs and heavy tits and slim lovely face whose ancestral mothers must have been bred in harems. The kind of unathletic helpless breeder to appeal to caliphs. The kind of sand dune that was made to be kicked around. Perhaps they are afraid I kick her around.

Daniel considered taking a city bus to the top of the hill but the traffic was bumper to bumper and they could almost outpace it by walking. With Phyllis beside him, her hand lightly on his arm, and with his thumbs hooked under the chest straps of the baby rig, he trudged up the hill. The road was jammed in both directions, and a blue haze of exhaust drifted through the heavy air. Daniel imagined it curling around his ankles, his waist, and finally his throat. A stone wall ran beside them separating the sidewalk from the hospital grounds. On the downhill side of the street were gas stations, dry cleaning drive-ins, car washes, package stores, pizza parlors. American flags were everywhere.

As they approached the top of the hill, they saw a stone kiosk in which a number of people waited for the bus. A bus arrived. It discharged its passengers, closed its doors with a hiss, and disappeared over the crest of the hill. Not one of the people waiting at the bus stop had attempted to board. One woman wore a sweater that was too small, a long loose skirt, white sweat socks and house slippers. One man was in his undershirt. Another man wore shoes with the toes cut out, a soiled blue serge jacket and brown pants. There was something wrong with these people. They made faces. A mouth smiled at nothing, and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled. A head shook in vehement denial. Most of them carried brown paper bags rolled tight against their stomachs. They seemed to hold their life in those bags. Daniel took Phyllis’ arm. As they reached the bus stop the weird people dispersed and flowed around them like pigeons scuttling out of their way, flowing around them and reforming behind them, stirring restlessly in the kiosk in the wake of their passing. Except for one man. One man, the one in the undershirt, ran ahead of them, looking back over his shoulder as they turned into the hospital grounds. He ran ahead of them waving his arm windmill fashion, as if trying to rid himself of the rolled up paper bag locked in his fist. Beyond him, down the tree-lined road (the fumy air clearing in the trees) was the turreted yellow-brick state hospital at Worcester, a public facility for the mentally ill.

SO THAT’S WHERE THEY’RE GOING!

From the Dartmouth Bible: “Daniel, a Beacon of Faith in a Time of Persecution. Few books of the Old Testament have been so full of enigmas as the Book of Daniel. Though it contains some of the most familiar stories of the Bible, nine of its twelve chapters record weird dreams and visions which have baffled readers for centuries.”

The way to start may be the night before, Memorial Day Eve, when the phone rang. With Daniel and his child bride at sex in their 115th Street den. The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection. And I have finally got her on all fours, hanging there from her youth and shame, her fallen blond hair over her eyes, tears sliding like lovebeads down the long blond hairs of her straight hair. The phone is about to ring. The thing about Phyllis is that when she’s stoned all her inhibitions come out. She gets all tight and vulnerable and our lovemaking degrades her. Phyllis grew up in an apartment in Brooklyn, and her flower life is adopted, it is a principle. Her love of peace is a principle, her long hair, her love for me—all principles. Political decisions. She smokes dope on principle and that’s where I have her. All her instinctive unprincipled beliefs rise to the surface and her knees lock together. She becomes a sex martyr. I think that’s why I married her. So the phone is winding up to ring and here is soft Phyllis from Brooklyn suffering yet another penetration and her tormentor Daniel gently squeezing handfuls of soft ass while he probes her virtue, her motherhood, her vacuum, her vincibles, her vat, her butter tub, and explores the small geography of those distant island ranges, that geology of gland formations, Stalinites and Trotskyites, the Stalinites grow down from the top, the Trotskyites up from the bottom, or is it the other way around—and when we cannot be many moments from a very cruel come that is when the phone rings. It is the phone ringing. The phone. I believe it is the phone.

But how would I get this scene to record Phyllis’ adenoidal prettiness, her sharp nose and fair skin and light Polish eyes. Or her overassumption of life, a characteristic of teenage girls of high school culture. How would it connote the debts all husbands pay for their excesses. Already stirring in this marriage not two years old were the forms of my fearful kindness coming out like magic watercolor under her rubbing. And if the first glimpse people have of me is this, how do I establish sympathy? If I want to show disaster striking at a moment that brings least credit to me, why not begin with the stacks, Daniel roaming through the stacks, searching, too late, for a thesis.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (July 10, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 081297817X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812978179
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.7 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #654,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,053 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #9,542 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #30,545 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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3.9 513 ratings

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E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career [places] him . . . in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.

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3.9 out of 5

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Janelle

Excellent

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2010

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The Story: As the novel opens a young man named Daniel, his wife and their baby are traveling to Worcester MA to see Susan, Daniels sister, who has recently attempted suicide. The most important event in Daniel and Susans childhood was the execution of their parents during the 1950s era Red Scare for conspiring to commit espionage. Susan has never been able to get past the trauma. She has however become a radical protesting the Vietnam War and wishes to set up a fund for revolutionary groups in memory of her parents. Daniel however is far more conflicted about the legacy of his parents and it's effect on him. While Susan became a radical Daniel removed himself from politics. He is supposed to be writing his dissertation at Columbia but instead writes "The Book of Daniel" a recounting of the time just before, during and after the execution of his parents. The novel is not linear Daniel bounces between his present circumstances, his childhood and points in between. He also shifts from 1st to 3rd person at random. Daniel alternates throughout the novel between a deep respect and admiration for his parents and a mocking disdain for them.

The Good: Pretty much everything. The non-linear narrative structure really conveyed how the execution of his parents reverberated through every aspect of Daniels adult life. Daniel is not always particularly likeable. He abuses his wife and in one instance his young child. Yet throughout you understand why Daniel is this way. The parts recounting Daniels childhood created a strong sense of claustrophobia as the story moved towards his parents execution. Daniels parents were not portrayed as revolutionary maytrs rather they were everyday people who happened to have radical ideas. I particularly loved how an entire period in history was encapsulated in the experience of one family. The most amazing thing about this book by far was the humanity of each character. From Daniels parents, to Daniel himself and to his sister Susan, even to the most unsympathetic Dr Mindish, each is ultimately only a flawed human being struggling to come to terms with their own lives and choices.

The Not So Good: Nothing to say here. I feel like anything I would think up would be at best nitpicky and at worst seeking out a criticism for its own sake.

The Bottom Line: For an unflinching and at times heartbreaking examination of how individuals get caught up and carried away by the currents of history pick this up.

9 people found this helpful

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Martha Miller

The Rosenbergs

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2016

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I've been trying to read more Doctorow since his death. I have read several others, but I wanted to read him homage to the Rosenbergs. The story is told by the son and is at the same time first and third person. I found the childhood of Daniel and his parents arrests, trials and executions interesting and well told. These stories are woven in with an adult sadistic Daniel who (understandably) is still seeking answers. And I suppose if there's something I didn't care for it is his unapologetic treatment of his wife. As I said, it is understandable. I just wonder if it was the path of least resistance.

5 people found this helpful

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Roger Rohweder

Unnecessarily difficult

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2017

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An interesting story, with a number of poignant moments, but made complicated by his jumping around in time with no hint that the he has shifted again. And again. Sexual comments seemed to be inserted as an “I am liberated” badge, rather than to enrich the moment. A long opinion piece.

One person found this helpful

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Eric Maroney

The Great American POMO Novel

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2015

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E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel is a fictionalized exploration of the Rosenberg’s arrest, execution, and the impact it had on their two children. Unlike other historical novels written by Doctorow, this novel does not use the names of real historical figures (for when the book was written, they were still alive) but he employs the same techniques he does in subsequent novels, weaving fiction and non-fiction elements into the whole.

As this book was written in 1971 so there are very many post-modern elements within. Most of the novel is Daniel’s first person exposition of events, but suddenly the narrative changes, often in mid-sentence, to third person. The book is fractured: letters, journal entries, Daniel’s dissertation, and presents us three endings, one more than The French Lieutenant’s Woman, written in 1969.

Doctorow is a masterful novelist, at home in any genre or technique, so these stunts are not forced or frivolous but integral to the plot. If you want to read a POMO novel without the gags and tricks of someone with a fresh MFA, playing with their new found toys, read this novel.

11 people found this helpful

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kathy miriam

or swallowing the patent misogyny--or taking it into account--I can't believe i never read this great author before

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2015

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Despite, or swallowing the patent misogyny--or taking it into account--I can't believe i never read this great author before. the Rosenberg execution is a kind of historical trauma, in particular for the left, and probably more in particular for Jewish members of the left. it shadowed my own childhood. I was impressed by the striking shifts in point of view--the ease in which the author moved from third to first person. I was moved by this kind of transition, moving inside and outside of the main character. I felt that the trauma was etched beautifully. The novel has an unusual quality of experimentation and accessibility. strong storytelling but stylistic innovation to some extent.

11 people found this helpful

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L. K. Brown

It's a wonderful book, but just too long

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2016

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This is a historical novel about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their children. The names are different and instead of two sons, the couple has a son and a daughter. It's a wonderful book, but just too long, so it becomes tedious after awhile.

13 people found this helpful

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Reuben Sivan

Bad edition (Kindle) of a great book

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2014

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I am afraid anyone looking at my low rating will think I rated the book contents. Amazon.com does not allow rating the book edition separately from the content, but if it did I would have given 5 stars to the book contents, and 1-2 stars to the terrible Kindle edition.
In a nutshell, the editions is full of errors, misspellings, missing words, incorrect capitalization, in short it was probably done by a scanner without a proper editor ever reviewing the result.
I verified these errors against a paper edition (Modern Library Edition 2005)

As an example, these three locations have "well" instead of "we'll" (it is correctly spelled in the printed edition):

P. 49: Well teach you!
p. 57: I will go back and take them to the park and well see if there are any boats on the river--
p. 58: There," Phyllis said. "You take a nap now. And soon well be at your grandma and grandpa's house

It's a shame!

88 people found this helpful

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Carmen Dumitriu

Buono

Reviewed in Italy on March 31, 2016

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Il libro va bene, e arrivato un po' in ritardo, ma e stato utile comunque. Sarebbe bene se non li servirebbero due settimane per mandare il libro.

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alex proctor

The book is written from the perspective of Daniel and explores the Macarthy period with great insight and telling observation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2015

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This deals with the arrest and trial and subsequent execution of the Rosenburghs and the effects their incarceration had on their two children . The book is written from the perspective of Daniel and explores the Macarthy period with great insight and telling observation. If anyone needed to be convinced why the death penalty should be abolished in America, then the description of both their deaths is essential reading. Horrendous period in American history - but with the rising inequality in the USA today the book still has relevance on Americans ideas on freedom and the pursuit of happiness!

2 people found this helpful

Michael Schäfer

A most intriguing piece of "postmodern" fiction

Reviewed in Germany on September 6, 2011

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E.L. Doctorows 1971 novel "The Book of Daniel" is both a fictionalization of the then controversial execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as "atom bomb spies" for the Soviet Union in the Cold War and Anti-Communist hysteria in the USA of the early 1950s and the McCarthy era, as well as an intriguing piece of fiction in its own right, a novel about a young man and his struggle to come to terms with his past and his present life. Daniel Lewin, protagonist and narrator of the novel, is a young graduate student and the elder of two children of the deceased Communist couple Rochelle and Paul Isaacson (easily identifiable as "the Rosenbergs"). In the course of the novel, the reader is granted more and more insight into his present life with his wife and his baby son, his conflicts with his foster parents and his sister, his struggle to position himself as a criticial thinker in the political framework of Vietnam War-traumatized America, and his longing to finally get to know the truth about why his parents were actually executed by a state that claims to be democratic and based on principles of justice. Thereby, the text is shaped by what one could label "postmodern" techniques: Neither is Daniel's life story told in a linear fashion, nor is he a reliable narrator, but rather a very doubtful and sometimes horribly unlikeable character, who on the other hand proves to possess a very intelligent and self-critical mind and does not take anything for granted, not even the left-wing myth of his own parents as heroes. Thus, "The Book of Daniel" delivers an intriguing mixture of captivating episodes of treason and betrayal, sex, rock music and drug abuse, but also reflections about post World War II US governmental policy, political systems in general and, last but not least, Communist ideology, with a critical focus on all these aspects. In this way, the novel manages to draw a multi-layered, critical, clear-sighted and unideological portrait of two periods of American history which are heavily intertwined - and certainly worth looking at from our 21st century perspective. But the most intriguing thing about Doctorow's novel is the fact that albeit this strong political focus, it is still a most personal and touching story of an angry, yet not inhuman young man who has suffered immensely, and who desperately strives to make sense of his existence. "The Book of Daniel" is one of the most complex and intriguing works of American fiction I have ever read - I can only recommend it to everyone who is willing to have a good read not exclusively for the prupose of quick entertainment, but also for serious reflection about such concepts as life, love, death and politics.

Nadia Kamolz

My absolute favorite book of all time.

Reviewed in Germany on January 9, 2022

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Very touching
Based on a true story about the Rosenbergs being arrested and the effect

Mrs's anon

Based on the Rosenbergs.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2021

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Got very depressed as I read. Had just finished the biography of Ethel Rosenberg which is why I read it. As dark as its cover. Couldn't empathise with the narrator. Didn't enjoy it.

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