Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006

Doctorow's collection of essays--mostly on authors and their works, with a couple of notable exceptions--is a fine idea, but not very compellingly executed. In any individual essay, his tone might be described as lofty, or academic. But consistent as it is throughout the collection, it takes on a rather imperious, even arrogant cast. These are a series of judgemental (rather than critical) essays, most of them composed in the thoroughly presumptuous first-person plural. Do "we" really see these things this way? Yes, we do; E.L. Doctorow said so.

It's probably no coincidence, also, that Doctorow concerns himself almost exclusively with men in this collection (again, with a notable exception), and that when he does speak of women (even in show more the aforementioned exception) he does so dismissively. He tosses away Dickinson in half a sentence. I'm nor a particularly ardent fan of hers, but I have to admit that he never won me back over after that.

I can't recommend the book, but since I keep mentioning exceptions, let me carve one out. The penultimate essay on Einstein is very good. It's insightful and illuminating, and ironically tells more about the act of writing than any of the previous essays--all of which are devoted to literature. This essay also eschews the plural form of the first person which I mentioned above, and that helps immensely. show less

57. Creationists : selected essays, 1993-2006 (Audio) by E. L. Doctorow read by the author (2006, 4:32, 192 pages in paper format, listened Aug 1-4, 20-24)
Rating: 4 stars

The title is maybe just there to get your attention. It's not a religious diatribe. However, he does open with an essay on Genesis, namely the story problem in Genesis: What story could these authors come up that would explain their world? And he closes with an essay on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust - which fits with our modern version of Judgment Day. But despite these touches of religion in the book ends, all Doctorow claims he means by "creationists" are those who create.

The book doesn't get much love and the audio version gets comments about how he can put show more you to sleep, since he reads himself. Knowing that may have made me more patient with it. What I got out of it was several terrific essays on mostly 19th century and early 20th century American writers. His essays on Genesis, Moby Dick, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway and John Dos Passos stood out.

2015
https://www.librarything.com/topic/191940#5254865 show less

I get the feeling that Doctorow found an old box in his attic containing his notebooks from high school English class and decided to publish the contents. Apparently, that semester they were reading only American or German authors. So we learn, among other things, that Poe was a very unusual man who wrote not well but memorably, Hemingway believed that life was a test of manhood and individualism, Fitzgerald had a brilliant youth but flamed out too early, and Kafka took familiar situations and made them seem fantastic in some odd way. What did they all have in common? Well, they created things. So why not start the collection with an essay on Genesis, in which we learn that God created the world, and end with a couple of essays in which show more we learn that Einstein created concepts that led to the Bomb, which will in turn dis-create the world. show less

Some of these essays read easily and some of them read in a very difficult way. It seems that critics often get into the heads of those they are critiquing and they end up writing in a similar style and use similar convolutions. The piece about Herman Melville didn't flow easily but the one about Mark Twain did. I liked the piece about Harpo Marx and the one about nuclear weaponry was thoughtful and I understood it. All-in-all I liked his other book of essays, "Reporting the Universe", better.

Collection of short essays on an interesting range of subjects (Harpo Marx, Kleist, Einstein, Sebald ...), nealy entirely devoid of interesting, original, or well-phrased insights.