(2 of 2)
Who knows? But now, in the title novella, we see where the question leads. The narrator, a blocked writer, has moved from his wife and his comfortable home in Connecticut to a Greenwich Village pad. He can't write in the burbs, can't stand the entanglement. Can he write in the Village? Well, he's trying, but his roiling thoughts won't order themselves tamely and obediently into fiction. There he sits at his desk, staring idly out of the window, listening to his middle-aged frame creak, finding a suspicious bump on his scrotum, brooding about traditional marriage: "battling, shrieking and occupying each other's brains like some terrible tumor until one of them dies." A theme here? Apparently not; he goes on to muse about middle age ("On the whole we are all quite game. It's life itself that seems to be wanting"), about his comical doorman, about whether to crank up an old affair with a woman who has sent him a postcard, about the arresting fact that the Manhattan Yellow Pages are available in Spanish. No, he decides, he can no longer write; the whole thing is hopeless. The novella peters out as messily as could be wished, without even a period to nail down its last sentence: "... maybe we'll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines"
But the reality, of course, is that Doctorow is writing, telling prickly truths, getting a life down on the page. The result is totally shapeless, but it is also funny and full of juice. It is interesting to note that John Updike, in his Bech chronicles, Philip Roth, in his Zuckerman books, and now Doctorow have written some of their best recent work about the impossibility of writing. Writers, it seems certain, will outsurvive cockroaches, no matter what toxins they spray on themselves. —By John Skow