LIVES OF THE POETS by E.L. Doctorow
Random House; 145 pages; $14.95
Anyone shrewd enough to make a living in the man-of-letters dodge knows that an occasional desk-clearing miscellany, a dustpan with hard covers, will be indulged between actual, seat-of-the-pants books. To E. (for Edgar) L. (for Lawrence) Doctorow's credit, he includes no commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash, surprisingly...
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