SOURCE: "Cover Stories," in London Review of Books, Vol. 7, No. 6, April 4, 1985, pp. 15-16.

In the following excerpt, Parrinder discusses Doctorow's narration in the tales that make up Lives of the Poets.

'Here's something out of the quaint past, a man reading a book,' remarks E. L. Doctorow's narrator as he rides the New York subway. The other passengers in the subway are not readers but listeners, hooked to their earphones and tape-players, 'listening their way back from literacy'. And before literacy? 'The world worked in a different system of perception, voices were disembodied, tales were told.' If tale-telling is the sign of a primitive culture, we—this would seem to imply—have the novel; and the more self-consciously civilised among novelists have sometimes been anxious to disclaim the form's own origins. As E. M. Forster wearily put it, 'Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a...