E.L. Doctorow, Sweet Land Stories

Now that E.L. Doctorow has been elevated to that rare pantheon of not-dead white writers worth reading, it will be worth checking out what has made him transcend the solipsistic excesses of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and his ilk. World’s Fair, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate were compulsively readable literature—and we have to thank Doctorow’s novel for inspiring the opening scene of the Bathgate movie version, when Dustin Hoffman is fitting Bruce Willis with concrete shoes, the better to toss Bruce in the East River. If only art really did imitate life. Sweet Land collects a handful of shorter Doctorow tales, all of which echo his familiar themes of alienation and survival in the American heartland.