Michelle Tokarczyk does not neglect the upper-case History that al-
ways seems to evade the novel's grasp, but she pays more attention to the
everyday social grime and mess in which Doctorow delightedly dirties his
hands. Asking “what it means to write political fiction in America ... at
this historical moment, ” Tokarczyk uses the word “political” in its en-
larged contemporary sense, a sense instructed by feminism and other
recent social movements to remember that strikes and barricades do not
exhaust the subject of politics. If “the personal is the political, ” then most
if not all novelists must count as political novelists. But Tokarczyk refuses
to take this easy way out. She gives Doctorow full credit for his commit-
ment to politics of a literal or traditional kind—for example, his treatment
of Boss Tweed in The Waterworks, which she presents as an allegory of
Reaganism—and she takes for her real subject what she calls Doctorow's
“politics of indirection”: the tense zone of subtle and unpredictable interactions that Doctorow sets up between such large, public, historical mat-
ters and the “personal” materials of the novel. She wants to know, for
example, what Daniel's sexual sadism has to do with the politics of the
Rosenberg case in The Book of Daniel, what the unashamed and
uncriticized upward mobility of Tateh and Houdini has to do with the
historical trajectory of Ragtime, what Joe's strange identification with the
union-busting detective next door has to do with the strike episodes of
Loon Lake. It is mystifying, piety-resistant puzzles like these that call for
skepticism and commitment to pool their resources.
from forward by Bruce Robbins
Michelle Tokarczyk "E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment"