Time defeats us in two ways: it bullies us by pursuit, and it mocks us with evasion. We grow older; we are consumed. Yet, at the same time, the events that practice on our mortality, that "do us in," are themselves disordered, senseless, refusing to cohere. E. L. Doctorow is a remarkable novelist precisely because he confronts the mockery of time directly and attempts to master it with footwork fancier and more playful….

[In] The Book of Daniel Doctorow already demonstrated his preoccupation with actual history, with real event. The outstanding achievement of that book was to establish a linearity that threaded among the confusions of three decades…. The central metaphor was brilliant. The images spectacularly appropriate. Equally impressive was Doctorow's handling of the tension between the character Daniel—the Daniel Agonistes—and the narrating Daniel, the desperate sardonic intelligence determined to see it all in pattern and...