Serious Fiction Fan Club May meeting

Edgar Doctorow is such a consummate writer it was difficult to pick a book that would properly introduce him to our readers. Basically, Doctorow writes compelling stories set within the cultural soup of a particular time period, and does it so well the reader feels like it is a fresh story told by a contemporary participant. Most have been hugely successful, several made into motion pictures.

Most are set in New York, "Ragtime" before World War One explores rampant capitalism and race relations before World War One. "Waterworks," set in the late nineteenth century has science fiction overtones. Both "World?s Fair," which won the National Book Award and Pen/Faulkner award winner, and "Billy Bathgate," are set in the thirties. Bathgate is the immensely entertaining story of a wily kid befriended by gangster Dutch Schultz, Also set in the prohibition era is my favorite, "Loon Lake," an opinion not universally held because the plot is deviously complicated. Even though a difficult read, pages and pages of Doctorow's fluid prose come very close to poetry and that is music to the ear of one in love with the English language.

His first critically acclaimed novel was "The Book of Daniel," a fictionalized story about the radicalized son of executed spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,is set in the fifties and sixties.

We picked his most recent novel, "The March," which won both the Pulitzer and the Pen/Faulkner. It is a fictionalized depiction of General William Tecumseh Sherman's famous March through the South, a scorched-earth campaign that plowed from Atlanta to Savannah and into the Carolinas in late 1864, at the end of the Civil War.

Wisely, the author doesn't attempt to point out that this is a novel of ideas. Instead, he makes it a novel of scenes, a pageant that flits from one character's experience of the march to another's, and mostly refrains from comment. It chafes a little to have to surrender a particularly appealing character or interesting situation when the march moves on, but that's the point; there's always a new one bringing up the rear.

The characters include not only the march's leader, Sherman, and his leaders, Grant and Lincoln, but grunts and generals and camp followers. Wrede Sartorius, a German-born doctor who also appears in Doctorow's "The Waterworks," cold-bloodedly perfects the art of surgery on the battlefield and predicts the medical advances to come. The daughter of a Georgia judge becomes, for a while, his helpmate and lover. A young girl, a freed slave with pale skin, tries to puzzle out her own identity, dressing as a boy and passing as white. Two hard-luck confederate deserters keep changing uniforms to save the skins underneath them. A randy Northern general treats the South like his own personal erotic candy box.

And so on through 358 very entertaining pages, a worthy introduction to the writing of one of America's greatest living authors.