A Student Of History

By Richard Lacayo

History. James Joyce called it a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. But for E.L. Doctorow it's more of an ill-defined dream state that he doggedly revisits, working all the while to get the thing decoded. In his best books, like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow mixes historical figures with fictional characters to discover the submerged foundations of the American psyche. His spellbinding new novel, The March (Random House; 363 pages), is one to put beside those, a ferocious reimagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange.

This time the story begins in the autumn of 1864. The intricate and troubled General William Tecumseh Sherman is leading 60,000 Union troops on his devastating final campaign of the Civil War. To demoralize the South, the seditious countryside of Georgia and the Carolinas is being deliberately humbled. Sherman's foraging parties are smashing the crockery of rich planters and making off with livestock and whiskey. Hundreds of slaves--men, women and children--are deserting their defeated masters and attaching themselves as refugees to Sherman's advancing army. "On the march," one character tells us, "is the new way to live."

Into this world that consists mostly of war--and this war consists largely of the fog of war--Doctorow introduces a multitude of characters who live by their wits, reinvent themselves ceaselessly and sometimes die abruptly. Arly and Will are two reprobate Confederate soldiers who adopt different colors, blue or gray, as the rules of survival require. Pearl is a half-caste slave girl shrewdly contemplating the horizons of her new freedom while serving for a while in the disguise of a Union drummer boy. Her former mistress Mattie Jameson is now a grief-crazed Confederate widow swept along with Sherman's forces. The far better-composed Emily Thompson, the daughter of a Georgia judge, rediscovers herself as a Union battlefield nurse while falling pointlessly in love with the coldly brilliant field surgeon Wrede Sartorius.

If Sartorius seems a familiar name, it's because we first glimpsed him in Doctorow's 1994 novel The Waterworks, a story of murderous intrigues in early 20th century Manhattan. And among the freed slaves is Coalhouse Walker, whose son and namesake will rage at the center of Ragtime. You sense that with this work Doctorow is inviting us to regard his novels as a career-length meditation on more than a century of the American past, with its bloodshed and racial obsessions, its hallucinatory edges and its complicated freedoms. The March is a more straightforward book than Ragtime. You won't find scenes here quite like the ones in that book in which J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford meet to trade views on the supernatural or Sigmund Freud takes Carl Jung to Coney Island (something that, by the way, actually occurred). But if the feelings this time flow more strictly from the facts, they flow abundantly all the same. At one point the thoughtful Emily defends herself against the merely rational Dr. Sartorius. "I do not reduce life to its sentiments," she insists to him. "I enlarge life to its sentiments." Doctorow often does the same, and in this book he does it magnificently. --By Richard Lacayo