The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were
executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have
been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their
deaths. He has not adjusted.
Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new
life--marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a
career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.
In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is
supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite
different.
It is a confession of his most intimate relationships--with his wife,
his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so
reproaches him.
It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated
Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father
away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents'
innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.
It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel's interviews with
people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his
strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.
It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case--lawyers,
police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.
It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of
immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie
marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century
of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of
Left politics in this country--its sacrificial rites, its peculiar
cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the
beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of
guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.
It is The Book of Daniel.
