For Doctorow, like those much older writers, the novel serves as a discursive microcosm in which the human beasts weather out the forces of social contradiction.
Unlike Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, and so many others for whom the novel was to grasp at the sublime totality and slippery machinations of its postmodern present, Doctorow seems, at least on outward appearances, to embrace a brand of historical fiction more like the naturalism of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, or John Steinbeck. On that score, Doctorow's books are almost uniformly devoted to a social vision all but outmoded by literary if not political and economic history. Surely the explanation for this has everything to do with the books themselves, and in particular with Doctorow's literary commitment to a way of living that survives only in the organic substance of community. That is to say, their publication was never greeted with the exuberant fanfare enjoyed by Thomas Pynchon, they were never believed to possess the historical prescience of Don DeLillo, and they were never met by the moral outrage that clings so lovingly to Philip Roth.
Doctorow relative to his contemporaries? Doctorow's novels have always been marginalized within the canon of postmodern American fiction. How do we account for the critical neglect of E.
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