E L Doctorow has, over the course of a long and illustrious career, earned a reputation as a skillful narrator of American society. But if the sweet spot of that career extends over two decades - from The Book of Daniel at the beginning of the Seventies to Billy Bathgate at the end of the Eighties - his words feel altogether less assured in All The Time In The World: New and Selected Stories, a collection of 12 pieces of contemporary and historical short fiction.
"These stories have been written over the course of many years," he reminds the reader in an introductory note. It is a timely if unintentional corrective, dished up perhaps to warn against expecting too much here in the way of either consistency or unity.
Doctorow was once asked out how he worked out endings in his fiction. He replied that it was like "driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you make the trip anyway." Sadly, he could easily have been passing comment on these works. His ambition seems limited by a narrow field of vision, his stories often feel like discarded fragments from stillborn novels. One also ends up questioning whether that journey was worth undertaking in the first place.
