Julian Murphet

Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

Doctorow’s America was whatever was left of FDR’s New Deal, battered and parceled out and sold to the highest bidder; or it was what made the New Deal necessary in the first place: vicious corporate monopolies, union-bashing, tycoons, and so on.