This section contains 1,256 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
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...
This section contains 1,256 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |