The Immersion Library

All Governments stand ready to commit their citizens to death in the interest of their government.

Doctorow uses three epigraphs to open this novel. One, from the biblical book of Daniel in which it states King Nebuchadnezzar requires all citizens to worship a golden image of himself lest they suffer the fiery furnace. Second, from Walt Whitman who differentiates the war drums music between the victors and those slain. Third and finally, from Allen Ginsberg who mourns his own mind as he has given it completely to his nation.

Under the sails of these excertps, the reader sets out at break-neck speeds through the tail of a son whose parents fall victim to the communist witch hunts of the Cold War era. He must wrestle with its impact on his childhood and then with the impacts of that childhood on his developing identity and journey through adulthood. He must find new meaning when he realizes the beautiful image of Nebuchadnezzar does not match the King himself. He must make new sense of music that plays for the slain rather than the victors. He must revitalize himself when he has nothing more to give.

Doctorow does not portray a son with saintly serenity and holy conviction in the lion’s den. He portrays any one of us who would enact such a script. In a sense, with concientious rigor, he must rebuild the institutions of his soul, things many people take for granted. He must question the truth about his parents and subsequently question the moral quality of that revelation – like watching an indoctrinated reverential figure fall from a pedestal. He must build for himself the nature of his role as brother and husband.

Ironically, this mirrors life during the Cold War as the American government squeezes so tightly to the moral, ethical and institutional pillars of American society that those pillars no longer guide them. By hunting the things they believe threaten those pillars, people begin questioning the government’s ability to uphold them. They question whether the government is for the people or for protecting its own power. Those invisible threads that bind society together, like what bind Daniel’s soul, begin to unravel like the statue on the pedestal. The things we take for granted as unassailable truths that guide us through storms suddenly indict the very helmsmen at the wheel.

One must also note the stylistic deviations Doctorow employs through the novel. He seamlessly switches between the first and third person narrative while also breaking the “fourth wall” by telling the reader exactly where he sits to write the novel. It portrays a shattered psyche, one that can exist simultaneously within one man in the world. He experiments with punctuation and capitalization, moves between narrative and historical lecture, all for the purpose of creating Daniel’s character; a nuanced man developed without the necessary parental cornerstone robbed of him by a government that oversteps its promises in order to fulfill them.

Daniel is a passionate man. The novel is a brilliantly paced depiction of a personal human journey through a crumbling faith in society and family. Yet he leads no revolutionary charge to avenge his victimization. He can only move forward, with mis-steps, pain, confusion, and perhaps with a purpose to rebuild a sense of himself.