The Book of Daniel

E.L. Doctorow found his voice in this, his third novel, published in 1971. The Book of Daniel places a family's destruction on a giant canvas – postwar Left politics – and achieves its ambitions with kaleidoscopic effects. The shifting narrative styles and digressions into subjects like Disneyland and the origins of the Cold War remind me of John Dos Passos's techniques in U.S.A., but they are done here not in imitation but in service of delineating the narrator's character. The novel casts a spell that is not easily resisted.