Sweet Land Stories

I read and enjoyed Doctorow's current historical novel of Sherman's march, "The March," and wanted to read more. Doctorow's "Sweet Land Stories" (2004) lacks the sweep of his Civil War novel. But it excells in its picture of American down-and-outers, loners, losers, grifters, and wanderers. It includes short but unforgettable scenes of a varied and almost timeless American, in rural Illinois, Chicago, Alaska, a religious commune, Las Vegas, and elsewhere. The book consists of five short stories, four of which appeared initially in the New Yorker while the fifth story, "Child, Dead in the Rose Garden" appeared first in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Each of the stories is faced-paced, draws the reader into the action, and can be read easily in a single sitting. The stories reminded me of Hubert Selby's "Last Exit to Brooklyn" and of the novels of Charles Bukowski without their rawness. Doctorow's is the voice of a polished literary artist. Three of the stories are told in the first person by male narrators. The first story "A House on the Plains" is recounted by Earle and tells of his conniving and murderous mother on a small farm in Illinois. For all the brutality and irony of the story, the characters come alive sympathetically. "Baby Wilson" is told in the voice of a young man with nowhere particular to go whose girlfriend has kidnapped a baby claiming it is the couple's. We are treated to a picturesque ride through dusty roads and small towns as the two loners truly become a couple and parents as well as they struggle to resolve the situation. "Walter John Harmon" tells the story of its namesake, a former garage mechanic and thief, and current alcoholic and philanderer, who becomes the leader of a religious commune. But the narrator is an attorney who has given up a staid if successful law practice and, with his wife Betty has joined the commune. The tone of the story is set by its first sentence: "When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon, I didn't think I reacted." Doctorow shows the credulous, unresolved needs of many people, including highly educated individuals, for belief and spiritual support, as the narrator is cuckolded by Walter John Harmon who runs off with Betty and abandons the commune to its fate. The story "Jolene:A Life" tells of a young woman with three bad marriages and other affairs who works through a life of trouble and attains a degree of peace at the end. This is a tawdry story with tawdry scenes, tattoo parlors, topless bars, sexual abuse, gangster-style killings,convincingly portrayed. Jolene struggles throughout all this to develop her talent as an artist. The final story, "Child Dead, in the Rose Garden" seems to me weaker than the others in that it is too overtly political. I had the same problem with Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" which is a fictionalized account of the Rosenbergs. This story also differs from its companions in that the protagonist is not a down-and-outer

Short stories are quite a challenge. You have to establish characters, mood, setting, conflict and context quickly. Then you have to move forward surely to your target with little wasted effort. If you accomplish all that, you only succeed if the story teaches you something that you find compelling. By those standards, the five stories in Sweet Land Stories are a tour de force. I was surprised to find this because I find Mr. Doctorow's novels to move in a very leisurely pace. But here, that pace turns into just the right speed. What the stories have in common is that you enter into worlds that operate at the fringes of society rather than near their center. So your characters have different problems than you and I think about every day. They also have unique solutions to their problems. The shift in focus is so complete that it's almost like reading science fiction. But the shift has a tether back to our lives . . . a tether that makes the lessons universal for us all. It's very impressive. In the first story, A House on the Plains, we have an attractive mother and her son who find themselves living on a farm they don't know how to operate after the mother's husband died in Chicago. The mother likes men. What they do next will surprise you with its chilling elements. The story is told from the perspective of the son which makes it quite macabre. What is our responsibility to our parents . . . and to our fellow humans? Baby Wilson will haunt you. A young woman decides to kidnap a baby. She's convinced the baby is hers. How will her boyfriend deal with this? You will find yourself in the shoes of the boyfriend as you share his dilemma. How do you protect the baby and your girlfriend? Walter John Harmon takes you deeply into the spiritual life of a cult whose messianic leader is under siege. How will the challenges of that siege affect the leader and the cult? You experience the story from the perspective of a cult member who is a lawyer trying to protect the cult. The story raises fine questions about self-deception that we all practice. Jolene: A Life is a very sad story. Born with beauty but few other advantages, Jolene floats like a wood chip atop the roiling waters of life. As her beauty is used up, she finds herself falling below the water line. And ultimately, she finds out what it is to love and lose. You see life as Jolene sees it. Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden is a cynical look at the ethics of powerful politicians and business people that will leave you gasping with its pain. You see this from the perspective of an investigator into the unexplained death of a child in the White House's Rose Garden. I don't remember a more compelling set of short stories written since the turn of the century. Don't miss them!

SWEET LAND STORIES is another superlative venture for E.L. Doctorow, one of the very finest writers in the country. Though known best for his larger tomes that mingle history and fiction as well as anyone has ever done, this small book of five stories reveals a master in creating characters and stories in a few pages that become indelible in the reader's mind. In his hands the most apparently simple settings become backdrops for complex, extensive tapestries that reveal how the 'little man/woman' can be pitched and tossed into the most bizarre tangle of events and yet somehow survive. In a time when many of us worry about the spiritual vacuum of life in the 21st Century, when the individual seems buried in the media pile of homogenation, look to Doctorow's fertile mind to remember and perhaps redefine the role of the Everyman. These stories are varied and extraordinarily well written: 'A House on the Plains' seems to be a tale of survival found in fleeing an urban center to a new life for a family on the plains, only to become a wholly different surprising macabre tale in the end: 'Baby Wilson' focuses on a couple who walk out a hospital with someone else's baby, flee, and watch their lives mutate; 'Walter John Harmon' concerns a community of brainwashed folk under the influence of a Spiritual Leader and the consequences of manipulation in the religion realm; 'Jolene: A Life' follows the course of an abused orphan through the country as she moves from one bad husband to the next - holding our hearts in her hand; 'Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden' is Doctorow's indictment of the credibility gap in the White House management of Intelligence sharing - a different and terrifying aside on terrorism so much in focus today. Doctorow tells these stories with elegant prose, terse and delicate economy, and once again proves he can spin a yarn better than most writers active today. A Brilliant Collection!

I have never read Doctorow before ~~ I have heard of Billy Bathgate but I have not read it. After reading this slim volume of short stories, I think I will add it to my wish list as well as his other works. Doctorow writes realistically and grittingly of real life. He writes of scam artists, kidnappers who returned a baby, living in a religious commune, a woman who survived three marriages only to rediscover herself in Hollywood and a murder mystery that the White House is intent on keeping covered up as a dead boy was found in the Rose Garden. All of these characters are different from one another and he manages to put in new perspectives of human nature in each of the stories. Sometimes, it's gritty and not so pleasant to read, the stories themselves are compelling and interesting. Now that I've "discovered" Doctorow through a mutual friend, I will now keep looking for his books to read in hopes they are as good as his short stories have proven. 9-11-04

I loved it!!! This was a very provocative and entertaining group of stories which held my attention. It did just what it was designed to do.... Get the reader to think but not too much.....Great fast read