ch postmodernists as Barth, Fowles, and Doctorow. What all of these writers share, across generations, is an appreciation of what is wrong with the universe and an insight into what might be called the content of nihilism. They all use literary forms to express such content. "If happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to live," says Nietzsche in a declaration against the rationalist tradition, "no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic's" (6). This is consistent with the technique in The Book of Daniel, in which Doctorow changes the names of the central figures from Rosenberg to Isaacson, creates a fictive psychological universe for the family, and sears the bigoted, red-baiting content of a sorry chapter in modern American history. It may be noted that Brecht's Galileo also deals with a historical person; however, Galileo had been dead for several hundred years before Brecht saw a connection between the fascism of the Renaissance Church and the fascism of modern political systems. Doctorow's putative sub
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