The title of Sweet Land Stories, a slim collection of five E.L. Doctorow tales, might seem to imply unity of space, suggesting that after spending a career tramping across American geography and history, Doctorow staked out a Yoknapatawpha to call his own. Instead, it seems to be a dark joke. Only displacement and homelessness, physical or psychological, unite Sweet Land's characters. They all drift through an America that, for one reason or another, they can no longer call home.
For the single mother and teenage son at the center of the collection-opening "A House On The Plains," not putting down roots is a matter of survival. Following them as they abandon early-20th-century Chicago for country life, the story lets the dull-witted son slowly reveal his mother as a femme fatale. Purer motives turn the kidnapping couple of "Baby Wilson" into lovers on the lam, while the heroine of "Jolene: A Life" follows her good looks into one abusive situation after another. Elsewhere, the devoted cult followers in "Walter John Harmon" only think they've found a permanent bit of paradise on earth, while the FBI-agent hero of "Child, Dead, In The Rose Garden" is forced to re-examine his understanding of his nation when a body turns up, as the title suggests, in the White House Rose Garden.
As usual, Doctorow treats his heroes with sympathy and intelligence, and Sweet Land Stories showcases his gift for squeezing deeply considered characters into brisk narratives. In that sense, the book is a welcome return to consistency after the alternately brilliant and shapeless City Of God. But in another sense, it's troubled with a lack of consistency. Both "Walter John Harmon" and "Child, Dead" have a tossed-off quality, and the latter reads like an airport thriller condensed into a 28-page treatment. But the book's early stories make it worth a look. With fine detail, "Baby Wilson" captures the way half of a couple adopts the other half's madness. And, though it makes pit stops in one clichéd situation after another, Jolene's journey follows the logic of a desperate search for identity. With no place of their own, Doctorow's drifters have only each other to call home, whether there's safety there or not.