[Doctorow's] splendid new novel ... combines the author’s saturnine strengths with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy ... The March...offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry ... Doctorow, at ease in the nineteenth century, demonstrates an impressive familiarity with military logistics and tactics prior to fully mechanized warfare ... The March carries us through a multitude of moments of wonder and pity, terror and comedy, to the triumph of Southern surrender and the sudden tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination. Sherman’s march is large enough, American myth enough, to pull even a laggard recruit along, and to hold Doctorow’s busy imagination fast to the reality of history even as he refreshes our memory of it.

Call it peristaltic storytelling: that process by which a writer captures his audience not by creating loose ends that must be followed, but by swallowing the reader whole and then conveying him—firmly, steadily, irresistibly— toward a fated outcome. E. L. Doctorow's heart-squeezing fictional account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's fiery, rapacious last campaign through the cities and countryside of the Confederate South moves along in the manner I've described—a narrative style that couldn't be more fitting because it reflects, we come to see, the way that Sherman's conquering army moved ... Yes, war is hell, and The March affirms this truth, but it also says something that most war novels leave out: hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it's by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world.

E.L. Doctorow's teeming fictional account of the army's progress through Georgia and the Carolinas, razing cities and plantations and sweeping up in its wake a mongrel procession of freed slaves and white refugees, is an extraordinary achievement, bringing together historical and invented characters and reviving with abundant color and energy an episode of American history whose consequences still reverberate in contemporary race relations. In the hands of a less skilled writer, such moral echoes might easily have been overplayed, but Doctorow treads with care and subtlety around the subject of slave-holding and introduces no anachronism; his characters' thoughts on freedom, predestination and race are consistently of their time and the reader is left to draw whatever inferences he or she may. Most remarkable is the author's expert choreography of his enormous cast ... Part of Doctorow's purpose is to reproduce the chaos and random cruelty of war; a number of other characters are introduced, complete with loves, fears and dreams, only to die horribly a few pages later. The obvious flaw with this approach is that the novel feels too diffuse and the reader grows wary of becoming attached to any one character ... Yet Doctorow invests even the smallest cameo with humanity and significance. Both dialogue and inner monologue are exquisitely rendered ... Doctorow's masterly novel resurrects a bloody conflict whose causes are not necessarily buried in the past.

The leanness of E.L. Doctorow's Civil War novel The March takes some getting used to, given that the book often strains to be more epic than its 360-page container will allow ... This isn't one of those sprawling, multi-part books where everybody has a rich backstory and a neat arc to follow. The March is messy, relentless, and essentially unchanging. It begins in chaos, and ends with the chaos momentarily abated ... Out of all The March's mayhem emerges a portrait of America that's both as subtle as Doctorow's prose and as penetrating as the metal spike that gets stuck in one character's head.

In a way, it's not quite a novel, and if you come to it expecting a novel's pleasures, you're likely to be disappointed. Better to think of this book as a Flemish painting, something replete with the allegorical significance of forward movement, like Hieronymus Bosch's 'Haywain,' in which worldly life is depicted as an overstuffed cart from which everyone is trying to grab his or her handful, oblivious to the fact that the journey is taking them from Paradise to Hell. Doctorow hasn't got Bosch's hankering for apocalyptic moralizing, though, so the tone is closer to Bruegel; the novel's wide field is studded here and there with pairs of characters, little incidents and moments, none given more weight than any other ... [Doctorow] makes it a novel of scenes, a pageant that flits from one character's experience of the march to another's, and mostly refrains from comment. It chafes a little to have to surrender a particularly appealing character or interesting situation when the march moves on, but that's the point; there's always a new one bringing up the rear ... It must be said that the black characters in The March are too uniformly noble, and this has the counterintuitive effect of depriving them of the stature of the flawed whites. The war is a mixture of grandeur and degradation, and only the characters who have sounded its depths seem to have fully grasped their experience.

The March brilliantly revises the received view of Sherman, and recovers the full complexity of this pivotal event. It does so, in part, by showing that there were limits to Sherman’s destructiveness ... Doctorow also shows that Sherman tried not only to destroy the old South, but also to create the new. He dramatizes something that tends to be forgotten: the march of the freed slaves which followed the march of the soldiers ... [Doctorow] reminds us that the great tragedy of Sherman’s march may lie not in what he destroyed, but in what he failed to create.

Doctorow patiently weaves...stories together, while presenting military strategies...with exemplary clarity. Behind it all stalks the brilliant, conflicted, 'volatile' Sherman, to whom Doctorow gives this stunning climactic statement: 'our civil war . . . is but a war after a war, a war before a war.' Doctorow’s previous novels have earned multiple major literary awards. The March should do so as well.

In this powerful novel, Doctorow gets deep inside the pillage, cruelty and destruction—as well as the care and burgeoning love that sprung up in their wake ... Most of the many characters are...well-drawn and psychologically deep ... Though his lyrical prose sometimes shades into sentimentality when it strays from what people are feeling or saying, Doctorow's gift for getting into the heads of a remarkable variety of characters, famous or ordinary, make this a kind of grim Civil War Canterbury Tales.