The Book of Daniel

The Book of Daniel is a novel by E. L. Doctorow, published in 1971. It is loosely based on the lives, trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, with the Isaacsons standing in for them.

Daniel Isaacson is the older brother, and his sister Susan is a student much more directly engaged with the political movements of the 1960s than he is. Their parents were convicted in a trial that divided the country and executed, leaving two children who have been famous all their lives for something they did not do. Daniel is trying to write about them and cannot keep his material in order: the narrative moves backwards and forwards between the trial, his childhood in foster homes, his marriage and his present attempts to make sense of what his family's fate has done to him and to his sister. The result is a book about the impossibility of telling a life story honestly when every account of it has already been written by other people.

Doctorow writes the novel as an argument with its own form, and the shifts in time and voice are part of the subject rather than devices around it.