Sweet Land Stories - Hardcover

E. L. Doctorow

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400062047 ISBN 13: 9781400062041

Publisher: Random House, 2004

Synopsis

One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live.

Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security.

Two of these stories have already won awards as the best fiction of the year published in American periodicals, and two have been chosen for annual best-story anthologies.
Composed in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.

About this title

About the Author

E. L. DOCTOROW is the author of City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, and The Waterworks. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. Doctorow lives and works in New York.

Reviews

It would be easy to call E.L. Doctorow the preeminent writer of historical fiction in America, but it would also be inaccurate. For if Doctorow has accomplished anything in his long and distinguished career, he has successfully illustrated just how flimsy and artificial the walls surrounding the literary ghetto of "historical fiction" really are.

From his doubt-haunted Western, Welcome to Hard Times; to his seminal recasting of pre-World War I America, Ragtime; through his exquisite, quasi-memoir, World's Fair, to his bold, spectral novel, The Waterworks -- Doctorow has succeeded as no one else has in tying our history to our present and to our future. He has always dug cheerfully, even joyously away at our cozy, received notions of the American past, laying the disturbing truths he has turned up brazenly on our doorstep.

Now the master is back with Sweet Land Stories, his first collection of short fiction since he published the superb Lives of the Poets 20 years ago.

It is a slim volume, only five stories -- yet it shows as well as anything Doctorow has ever written that our present and our supposedly long-buried past are really quite interchangeable. Doctorow has tried his hand at contemporary fiction before -- initially in his brave, experimental Big As Life; more successfully in his most recent novel, City of God -- and here he is able to move seamlessly from one time to another. The first of these stories is set a century or so in the past, the other four more or less in the here and now, but all of them could take place essentially anytime in America. Each of them features the sorts of marginal characters who have always resided on the periphery of our civilization, though the reasons for their presence there differ greatly. Doctorow's protagonists include a pair of serial murderers, a delusional young baby thief, a petty criminal and hustler, a teenage wife, a member of a cult, a mentally fragile young heiress and a disillusioned FBI agent.

And all of them remain, in their own twisted ways, stubbornly optimistic -- a trait that marks them as distinctly American. They scheme, steal, dare, plan and improvise endlessly, still convinced that they can find whatever they are looking for -- money, love, justice, a rationale for their own existence -- somewhere out in the sweet, vast land. Most of them start out west of the Mississippi and tend to slide farther in that direction. Even the addled young lovers in "Baby Wilson," whom we first meet in some Los Angeles slum, manage to end up in Alaska -- after a quick detour to Las Vegas, the undisputed capital of tawdry dreams.

It is Doctorow's genius that he is able to make us sympathetic with even the creepiest of their aspirations. One actually finds oneself rooting for the murderous mother-son duo in "A House on the Plains," the best story in the collection, and one that speaks directly to the underside of the great American push westward, and upward. Doctorow's ability to create such an unlikely identification is due in no small part to his expert use of an elusive, first-person narrator in three of these stories. Semi-naive, subtly disingenuous -- not quite an unreliable narrator per se, but a voice that one begins to suspect is telling us exactly what we want to hear. He uses this technique both to build sympathy for the hard-pressed hustler in "Baby Wilson" -- and to slowly pull it out from under the feet of the lawyer-turned-cult-acolyte in "Walter John Harmon." It is, as well, a marvelous vehicle for Doctorow's typically clean, sparse prose, and the dry wit, even ebullience, that has always served to leaven even his darkest creations.

The two third-person stories work less well, but they also demonstrate the author's fundamental empathy toward his characters. If "Jolene: A Life" reads something like a bad country-western song, with one heart-wrenching cliché after another perpetrated upon its young heroine, Doctorow seems to be suggesting that many American lives are nothing but second acts today: an exhausting treadmill of reinventions, recoveries, remarriages and divorces. Even the weakest story here, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" -- an overly preachy tale about someone leaving the body of a child on the White House grounds -- succeeds in establishing both how far Doctorow's characters are from having any real effect on the world they inhabit, and how stubbornly they refuse to admit this. Can anyone today doubt that the administration in power would react just as it does in the story -- secretly burying the body, threatening and harassing anyone who might leak the news? Or that its troubled protagonist would feel so distant from "the gentlemen who run things" that she laments, "I just thought maybe this could restore them, put them back among us"? Another American on the margins, still hoping to be heard after all this time.

Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Each critic professes great respect for Doctorow, who, at age 73 and many awards later, has earned it. However, there the split begins. Many critics hail these stories, four of which were published previously in The New Yorker, as an achievement that perfectly captures the American nation’s mood, its aberrant characters, and dark underbelly. But others dismiss the book as a slim, shallow effort that does not live up to Doctorow’s past work. Common complaints? “A House on the Plains” doesn’t fit in with the other four stories, and “Child, Found Dead in the Rose Garden,” which could have been a powerful political piece, doesn’t live up to its promise.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

As one might expect of Doctorow, the title is ironic. In settings that range across the U.S., most of the alienated characters in the five stories here find life anything but sweet as they struggle to surmount the stigmas of poverty, lack of education and their instincts to gamble against the odds. Three of the male protagonists are passive and amoral; attempting to defend their irrational behavior, each reminds himself that he is not stupid. All of themâ€"a young grifter who dutifully abets his mother's murderous greed on a farm near Chicago ("A House on the Plains"); a love-besotted accessory to a kidnapping in California (the slyly humorous "Baby Wilson"); and a cuckolded member of a religious cult commune in Kansas ("Walter John Harmon")â€"share a capacity for self-delusion and self-preservation. The two female protagonists attempt to alter fate and find themselves buffeted by the inescapable force of male power. The protagonist of "Jolene: A Life" is forced into a cross-country hegira in pursuit of a sweet land where she won't be an outsider. Scared and desperate despite her cool facade, Jolene becomes a victim in every relationship. If the story's denouement veers too close to soap opera, Doctorow's empathetic character portrayal redeems the plot twists. The most riveting narrative, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," describes a presidential administration that is secretive, arrogant and contemptuous of ordinary citizens. In this knowing treatment of the cynical abuse of power, Doctorow uses the spare, laconic style endemic to thrillers and builds suspense with sure strokes. Boring like a laser into the failures of the American dream, he captures the resilience of those who won't accept defeat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Doctorow is at once a supremely entertaining storyteller and a profound writer of conscience, and he forges an extraordinarily potent blend of artistry, compassion, and covert outrage in his new short story collection, the first since the indelible Lives of the Poets (1984). Here are five perfectly honed and sharp-edged stories about faith, love, and the abuse of power. Five ambushing and hair-raising tales featuring intensely compelling characters and impossible situations that unveil key paradoxes intrinsic to American society. Set in the horse-and-buggy era, "A House on the Plains" charts the adventures of an enterprising woman and her grown son, who reluctantly leaves Chicago to accompany her on what turns out to be a diabolical mission in a small Illinois town. The criminal mind fascinates Doctorow, as does the law and its failings, and men's cruelty toward women, tragic realities he sure-handedly explores to powerful effect in "Jolene: A Life," a classic hard-luck, white-trash tale with universal implications. Doctorow boldly takes on the enigma of religious cults in the eerie "Walter John Harmon," and in the scorching story, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," he shrewdly and devastatingly uncloaks the workings of an utterly corrupt White House, and the drastic consequences of such a colossal betrayal. At base, what Doctorow's unique and electrifying stories grapple with is our longing to trust authority and our realization that, instead, we must always question it. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A House on The Plains

Mama said I was thenceforth to be her nephew, and to call her Aunt Dora. She said our fortune depended on her not having a son as old as eighteen who looked more like twenty. Say Aunt Dora, she said. I said it. She was not satisfied. She made me say it several times. She said I must say it believing she had taken me in since the death of her widowed brother, Horace. I said, I didn’t know you had a brother named Horace. Of course I don’t, she said with an amused glance at me. But it must be a good story if I could fool his son with it.

I was not offended as I watched her primp in the mirror, touching her hair as women do, although you can never see what afterwards is different.

With the life insurance, she had bought us a farm fifty miles west of the city line. Who would be there to care if I was her flesh and blood son or not? But she had her plans and was looking ahead. I had no plans. I had never had plans—just the inkling of something, sometimes, I didn’t know what. I hunched over and went down the stairs with the second trunk wrapped to my back with a rope. Outside, at the foot of the stoop, the children were waiting with their scraped knees and socks around their ankles. They sang their own dirty words to a nursery rhyme. I shooed them away and they scattered off for a minute hooting and hollering and then of course came back again as I went up the stairs for the rest of the things.

Mama was standing at the empty bay window. While there is your court of inquest on the one hand, she said, on the other is your court of neighbors. Out in the country, she said, there will be no one to jump to conclusions. You can leave the door open, and the window shades up. Everything is clean and pure under the sun.

Well, I could understand that, but Chicago to my mind was the only place to be, with its grand hotels and its restaurants and paved avenues of trees and mansions. Of course not all Chicago was like that. Our third floor windows didn’t look out on much besides the row of boardinghouses across the street. And it is true that in the summer people of refinement could be overcome with the smell of the stockyards, although it didn’t bother me. Winter was another complaint that wasn’t mine. I never minded the cold. The wind in winter blowing off the lake went whipping the ladies’ skirts like a demon dancing around their ankles. And winter or summer you could always ride the electric streetcars if you had nothing else to do. I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and the peddlers and the boom and clank of the freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn’t hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up under the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built— a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from.

Besides, I would miss my friend Winifred Czerwinska, who stood now on her landing as I was going downstairs with the suitcases. Come in a minute, she said, I want to give you something. I went in and she closed the door behind me. You can put those down, she said of the suitcases.

My heart always beat faster in Winifred’s presence. I could feel it and she knew it too and it made her happy. She put her hand on my chest now and she stood on tiptoes to kiss me with her hand under my shirt feeling my heart pump.

Look at him, all turned out in a coat and tie. Oh, she said, with her eyes tearing up, what am I going to do without my Earle? But she was smiling.

Winifred was not a Mama type of woman. She was a slight, skinny thing, and when she went down the stairs it was like a bird hopping. She wore no powder or perfumery except by accident the confectionary sugar which she brought home on her from the bakery where she worked behind the counter. She had sweet, cool lips but one eyelid didn’t come up all the way over the blue, which made her not as pretty as she might otherwise be. And of course she had no titties to speak of.

You can write me a letter or two and I will write back, I said.

What will you say in your letter?

I will think of something, I said.

She pulled me into the kitchen, where she spread her feet and put her forearms flat on a chair so that I could raise her frock and fuck into her in the way she preferred. It didn’t take that long, but even so, while Winifred wiggled and made her little cat sounds I could hear Mama calling from upstairs as to where I had gotten.

We had ordered a carriage to take us and the luggage at the same time rather than sending it off by the less expensive Railway Express and taking a horsecar to the station. That was not my idea, but exactly the amounts that were left after Mama bought the house only she knew. She came down the steps under her broad-brim hat and widow’s veil and held her skirts at her shoe tops as the driver helped her into the carriage.

We were making a grand exit in full daylight. This was pure Mama as she lifted her veil and glanced with contempt at the neighbors looking out from their windows. As for the nasty children, they had gone quite quiet at our display of elegance. I swung up beside her and closed the door and at her instruction threw a handful of pennies on the sidewalk, and I watched the children push and shove one another and dive to their knees as we drove off.

When we had turned the corner, Mama opened the hatbox I had put on the seat. She removed her black hat and replaced it with a blue number trimmed in fake flowers. Over her mourning dress she draped a glittery shawl in striped colors like the rainbow. There, she said. I feel so much better now. Are you all right, Earle?

Yes, Mama, I said.

Aunt Dora.

Yes, Aunt Dora.

I wish you had a better mind, Earle. You could have paid more attention to the Doctor when he was alive. We had our disagreements, but he was smart for a man.





The train stop of La Ville was a concrete platform and a lean-to for a waiting room and no ticket-agent window. When you got off, you were looking down an alley to a glimpse of their Main Street. Main Street had a feed store, a post office, a white wooden church, a granite stone bank, a haberdasher, a town square with a four-story hotel, and in the middle of the square on the grass the statue of a Union soldier. It could all be counted because there was just one of everything. A man with a dray was willing to take us. He drove past a few other streets where first there were some homes of substance and another church or two but then, as you moved further out from the town center, worn looking one-story shingle houses with dark little porches and garden plots and clotheslines out back with only alleys separating them. I couldn’t see how, but Mama said there was a population of over three thousand living here. And then after a couple of miles through farmland, with a silo here and there off a straight road leading due west through fields of corn, there swung into view what I had not expected, a three-story house of red brick with a flat roof and stone steps up to the front door like something just lifted out of a street of row houses in Chicago. I couldn’t believe anyone had built such a thing for a farmhouse. The sun flared in the windowpanes and I had to shade my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I saw. But that was it in truth, our new home.

Not that I had the time to reflect, not with Mama settling in. We went to work. The house was cobwebbed and dusty and it was rank with the droppings of animal life. Blackbirds were roosting in the top floor, where I was to live. Much needed to be done, but before long she had it all organized and a parade of wagons was coming from town with the furniture she’d Expressed and no shortage of men willing to hire on for a day with hopes for more from this grand good-looking lady with the rings on several fingers. And so the fence went up for the chicken yard, and the weed fields beyond were being plowed under and the watering hole for stock was dredged and a new privy was dug, and I thought for some days Mama was the biggest employer of La Ville, Illinois.

But who would haul the well water and wash the clothes and bake the bread? A farm was a different life, and days went by when I slept under the roof of the third floor and felt the heat of the day still on my pallet as I looked through the little window at the remoteness of the stars and I felt unprotected as I never had in the civilization we had retreated from. Yes, I thought, we had moved backward from the world’s progress, and for the first time I wondered about Mama’s judgment. In all our travels from state to state and with all the various obstacles to her ambition, I had never thought to question it. But no more than this house was a farmer’s house was she a farmer, and neither was I.

One evening we stood on the front steps watching the sun go down behind the low hills miles away.

Aunt Dora, I said, what are we up to here?

I know, Earle. But some things take time.

She saw me looking at her hands, how red they had gotten.

I am bringing an immigrant woman down from Wisconsin. She will sleep in that room behind the kitchen. She’s to be here in a week or so.

Why? I said. There’s women in La Ville, the wives of all these locals come out here for a day’s work who could surely use the money.

I will not have some woman in the house who will only take back to town what she sees and hears. Use what sense God gave you, Earle.

I am trying, Mama.

Aunt Dora, goddamnit.

Aunt Dora.

Yes, she said. Especially here in the mi...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400062047
• ISBN 13: 9781400062041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160