The thing that struck me most about this work was the fact that I found myself immediately taken in by almost all of the many narrative strands, and was happy each time one of them resurfaced. (The exceptions being the commentaries on songs, and possibly the passages narrated by Wittgenstein which struck me as being written by someone who had a less than tight grasp on the man's philosophy.) All of the characters were sympathetically and richly drawn -- quite a feat considering how infrequently we meet with most of them -- and all of the ruminations were beautifully written which makes up for the fact that very few of them had anything truly original to say. I'm not sure how original Doctorow thought his ponderings on physics and metaphysics were supposed to be -- I'm guessing he knew their level of sophistication and originality very well. The originality, I think, was meant to come in where it's suposed to come from in a novel -- from the stories of particular lives. And these stories -- both on the individual level, and as a conglomerate -- succeeded in injecting the book with real originality and even brilliance.
