My complaint is not that [Loon Lake] is a bad, awful, commercial, exploitive book. Those books come labeled—we recognize them in an instant. This book is more deeply and subtly exploitive. It appears to concern itself with decades and figures of the past, with the Depression, with working conditions, labor strife, violence…. It appears by the act of imitation to want to pay respects to writers of the past: Dos Passos comes first to mind. It appears to be seeking a style: at any rate it abandons both punctuation and the formal sentence, as if, like Joyce, James, Faulkner, or Hemingway, Doctorow were seeking new range and flexibility in the language. All these devices suggest a literary intelligence and make me feel that I am in the presence of something serious.

And indeed I am, for this is a failed work of a serious man…. I recognize...