When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cleave first catches sight of Mrs. Gray – the mother of his best friend – what he sees is a reflection of a reflection. As he waits in the hallway of her house, he sees her naked, “not nude”, in the full-length mirror fixed to the outside of her bedroom door. It is only a reflection of her image caught in the mirrors of the three-paneled dressing … [Read more...]
The Novel as History: An essay on the book Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow
The novel Homer and Langley is part history and part fiction: a distinction without a difference within its pages. Doctorow has gained a reputation for taking considerable liberties with recorded history, for frequently transgressing the boundaries between fact and fiction. For him, all purely historical explanations of the past have proved inadequate, as they do not account … [Read more...]
