THE DOCTOROW IS IN

E.L. Doctorow

I was asked for a sample of the story I mentioned in the last post. I chose a section right when the man and woman are about to drop the kidnapped infant off at a Catholic Church, thinking, I assume, that church folk will have instant compassion and concern for an abandoned baby. When the woman expresses some hesitancy about knowing the etiquette for the sacrament of Confession, Doctorow writes the following:

Lester, she said, I don't know the right words for confessing.
It's O.K., I said, just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It's somewhere off to the side. You don't have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don't have to cross yourself or anything, he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God, too, that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.

Man, that's good shit. It's colloquial language spoken by a couple blue collar, disenfranchised drifters written in a rhythm that is postively poetry by a man in his early 70s.

Here's some more just before Karen enters the church:

Before she took a breath and stepped down from the Windstar, she held the baby in her arms and caressed his round little head and brushed his dark hairs with the tips of her fingers as he stared up at her in his impassive manner and then looked away. And then Karen slipped him gently into my arms like a friend of the mother's who has been given the privilege for just that moment of holding another woman's child.

It's like BUTTAH.

In my last post, I ended saying it makes me want to write. The other side of that double-edge sword, is that writing that is that good also often makes me want to hurl my computer through the window, scream, "What was I thinking?" and take up macrame. My aunt used to make such nice macrame owls when I was a kid.

Forgive me if I've abused the Fair Use Doctorine, but only two people in the world read this blog.