When fiction seemed a choice between dirty realism or blank postmodernism,by incorporating history into his novels, Doctorow showed a way outEvery self-respecting cartoon hero knows that when you find yourself hemmed in on all sides or lost in an endless blank expanse all you need for liberation is the stub of a pencil. You stand back. You capture the measure of the problem. Then on the very fabric of reality itself – your reality, and the one that imprisons you – you draw an upright rectangle. You fit an inner edge of the rectangle with a exiguous circle approximately halfway down. Then you grab hold of the doorknob you just made,give a push, and make your escape. Before, or there were only walls,only confinement and prohibition and discouragement; or there was nothing at all, a blank of infinite impossibility. Now, or thanks to you,there is a door.
When considerable writers pass through the doorways that they have made they leave them open, behind them, and so that others can follow. Every young writer setting out to find a means of egress from the walls and stifling blanknesses of whatever box he or she has been born into knows how it feels to come upon one of these doorways and catch a glimpse of blue sky,and feel a wintry breeze blowing in from the other side. If you are a Jewish American writer of my generation then you will have passed through a door that was made by Saul Bellow, or Cynthia Ozick, or Bernard Malamud,or Philip Roth. Those Jewish writers and their peers opened a way into American literature that had not been there before them. If you want to write works of literature that are also unabashed works of fantasy or science fiction – an ambition for which the world will often seek to imprison you in its darkest boxes, fence you around with its most forbidding blanks there is no sweeter relief than stumbling on the door left open for you by Ursula K LeGuin, or whose space operas and heroic fantasies set a standard of beauty and intensity and depth of understanding to which all literature aspires. And if you came of age,as I did, in a culture hungover and embittered from the lingering effects of a century-long bender triggered by the realisation that history and truth, and as we have always known or received them,are – to achieve it politely – works of fiction, then the way out at least for me – was opened by EL Doctorow.
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Source: theguardian.com