false<![CDATA[The March: A Novel]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167544614m/24914.jpg2491416 As the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death, destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In <i>The March</i>, E.L. Doctorow has put his unique stamp on these events by staying close to historical fact, naming real people and places and then imagining the rest, as he did in <i>Ragtime</i>.
Recently, the Civil War has been the subject of novels by Howard Bahr, Michael Shaara, Charles Frazier, and Robert Hicks, to name a few. Its perennial appeal is due not only to the fact that it was fought on our own soil, but also that it captures perfectly our long-time and ongoing ambivalence about race. Doctorow examines this question extensively, chronicling the dislocation of both southern whites and Negroes as Sherman burned and destroyed all that they had ever known. Sherman is a well-drawn character, pictured as a crazy tactical genius pitted against his West Point counterparts. Doctorow creates a context for the march: "The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize... There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?"
The characters depicted on the march are those people high and low, white and black, whose lives are forever changed by war: Pearl, the newly free daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, Colonel Sartorius, a competent, remote, almost robotic surgeon; several officers, both Union and Confederate; two soldiers, Arly and Will, who provide comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare's fools until, suddenly, their roles are not funny anymore.
Doctorow has captured the madness of war in his description of the condition of a dispossessed Southern white woman: "What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson's mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable." And later, "This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle."
As we have come to expect, Doctorow puts the reader in the picture; never more so than in recalling "The March" and letting us see it as a cautionary tale for our times. <i>--Valerie Ryan</i>19971652005The March: A Noveltotal:1360|5:224|4:545|3:443|2:117|1:31|13604894193623035falsefalseWed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Sun Jul 22 01:30:57 -0700 2007Tue Aug 28 21:44:35 -0700 2007 Such has been my feeling about all three of the Doctorow novels I've read, Billy Bathgate, City of God and The March. All of these novels are well-structured, technically proficient works, and all contain something that makes them above average.
But n...more...]]>
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Ragtime acquired when I attended Ragtime Night at Comiskey Park sometime in the late 1970s (I find the notion that copies of a Doctorow novel were given away by the thousa...more...]]>
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Georgia Library Quarterly.]
From the author of such acclaimed works as Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, The March is E.L. Doctorow's first full-length work in five years. Doctorow’s novel covers the Civil War march of General William Tecu...more...]]>
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The March as part of a class on a Story Cycles and Novellas, despite the fact that it is, technically, neither. Instead, The March is a complex, crowded novel. It shares a few attributes of story cycles, such as introducing a wide variety of characters, shifting points of view and the fact ...more...]]>
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Critics call The March an unequaled success, reminiscent of Doctorow's classic Ragtime in spirit and The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, and Gone With the Wind in grand scope and "churn and boil of a plot" (Rocky Mountain News). Rather than focusing on the causes of war, Doctorow show...more...]]>
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