Customer Reviews

Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Everything that Doctorow writes shows his mastery, but I cannot say that I enjoyed this slim collection; indeed, if it had not been so slim I doubt I'd have finished it. The novella which gives its title to the collection is virtually plotless, seeming more like a memoir than a story. In apparently random manner, Doctorow describes the social lives, affairs, and marriages of a group of his fellow writers. "I am not talking about divorced couples, you understand, but couples not entirely together." Everybody seems to be floating in a social limbo where personal ties are transitory and superficial, and upon which the outside world impinges only as a distant annoyance. In a word, anomie.

The novella is given a little more weight by the addition of six very short stories, most of which are also virtually plotless and portray the same qualities of social isolation. In several instances, images from the novella crop up again in the stories, or vice-versa. Doctorow has always been fond of cross-connecting his works, but several of the stories have the air of being discarded fragments from one of his novels; one even shares almost the same title, THE WATERWORKS. As I say, nothing that Doctorow writes is without interest, but these fragments might better have been left on the cutting-room floor.