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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence. From the Trade Paperback edition..… (more)
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It might sound perverse to take a book's measure from it's first paragraph--but it was a long paragraph--three pages long. We're introduced to the central family of the novel, referred to only as "Father," "Mother," "Grandfather," "Little Boy," and most important, "Mother's Younger Brother." It's not a unified topic-sentence king of paragraph either, but this long incoherent meandering melange mentioning, along with the fictional family, a potpourri of historical figures from the turn of the 20th Century. Here's a snatch of that paragraph that was typical of the syntax: "On the roof. There were screams. Evelyn fainted." Oh, and not only wasn't dialogue not offset by quotation points, but unlike Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier, Doctorow doesn't even deign to set each speaker off with different paragraphs.
I found this book an unreadable mess. One of the worse novels I've ever tried reading. I guess I shouldn't be surprised some claim it to be great literature given what I've seen praised, but anyone who tried to tell me they enjoyed this with a straight face? I'd back away slowly.
“Ragtime” is an ambitious book that attempts to mix the history of the times with three different fictional story lines. Set largely in and around New York City, the author haphazardly mingles the narratives of an upper-middle class family (Father, Mother, Younger Brother, the Boy), an immigrant family (Tateh, Mameh, the Girl), and a jazz musician and his fiancée (Colehouse Walker, Sarah) with a dizzying array of real-life characters, including Ford, Morgan, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, and Admiral Peary. Unfortunately, none of these invented tales is particularly compelling and the one involving Colehouse Walker is both overwritten and completely implausible.
Although widely regarded as one of the best American novels of the last 100 years, I must confess that I found reading it to be a mildly disappointing experience. The problem, I think, is that the author seems so committed to working into the story as many cultural touchstones as possible that the fictional elements seem underdeveloped by comparison. At slightly more than 250 pages, the book is really too slight for its intended purpose; it felt as if the reader was being rushed through a history lesson at the expense of character development and the plot. While the historical references were interesting—this is an understudied era, at least by me—I did not come to care much at all about the fates of any of the characters. So, while successful in teaching me something about the events of the ragtime era in America, the book ultimately fell short of being a satisfying literary adventure.
Ragtime is rather a mix of people
"This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being."
The way it was written puts me in mind of Gore Vidal's Creation, with the insertion of historical characters into realistic settings of a fiction novel. It's really hard to explain much of the book without giving things away, though; plus the back blurb on my copy merely says when it's set, that the lives of some families become entwined, lists some names that make appearances, and then says it's so original and full of imagination and pleasure that to describe it further would dilute the joy of reading it, and that "nothing quite like it has ever been written before." So I'm going to heed their advice and stop trying to figure out what I can write about it. I will simply say it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
"They would never let me out of here, you know that. And if they did they would spare no effort to hunt me down. And everyone with me would be hunted down. And you would all die. To what purpose? For what end?"
Somewhat less vague is the reason why I got interested in him again after all, namely me stumbling across various mentions of Ragtime as a novel important for the development of the historical novel in the 20th century. As I have always had a soft spot for historical novels, and an interest in how a genre that belongs so distinctly to the 19th century and its unshaken belief in the capability of fiction to represent the real has managed to not only survive into the 20th and 21st centuries but also has re-invented itself several times over to remain alive and relevant. While that had me teetering on the brink of reading a novel by him, it was his recent death that pushed me over, with its rather uncomfortable reminder that I am slowly but steadily running out of time to read and so had better get to it.
Ragtime was named, as Wikipedia informs me, for “its syncopated, or ‘ragged’, rhythm” and one can see after reading just a few pages how this fits the book, in particular its language. It is written mostly in short, simple sentences, in a very matter-of-fact style; and several references to an anonymous “we” that is collecting and presenting evidence made me think of a chronicle or some kind of report. But again and again there are interspersed between the plain statements longer sentences, where language takes off and becomes fanciful, lyrical even, disrupting the steady flow of facts, or – to stay in the metaphor – syncopating them, introducing an off-beat element. And also pretty quickly it becomes obvious how this fits the content of the novel as well when on the unblemished white of the petit-bourgeois world there are more and more outbreaks of colour, immigrants and negroes disrupting the orderly world of the Anglo-Saxon middle classes.
There seems to me to be a certain double entendre in the novel’s title – “ragtime” not only as the musical genre of that name, but also literally as a time of rags; very early in the novel one of its many protagonists (if one wants to call them that, more on that later) sees a “rag ship” coming into harbour filled with dark-skinned immigrants just as he leaves on an expedition for the white wastes of the North Pole. It’s maybe a bit too blatant, but one cannot deny that the irony that Doctorow has arranged here is quite exquisite. Rags, then, are everything that is outside of the orderly (and always immaculately dressed) white middle classes, the immigrants, the negroes, the working classes (one also can’t but thing of the Lumpenproletariat which actually might be translated literally as “rag proletariat”). Doctorow sets his novel at the start of the 20th century, at a time when all kinds of social unrest were fermenting, when Unions and socialists (actual socialists, that is, not what passes for it these days in the muddled minds of most Republicans) still had a public voice in the USA, and where in fact many people were expecting the US to be the first country to have a Communist revolution (a much more likely candidate than Russia).
I think what Doctorow tried here is to write an anti-Bourgeois novel – quite an ambitious project considering how much the bourgeoisie has made the novel form its own during the 18th and 19th centuries. And his formally most audacious move in achieving this is to remove the individual protagonist; Ragtime is very far from being the Bildungsroman of a single consciousness rising from immaturity to becoming a responsible citizen, but instead presents a whole host of protagonists (I did not bother to count, but it is an astonishing number for such a comparatively short novel) without favouring any of them but instead jumping from character to character gradually coalescing the threads into some kind of whole by letting them criss-cross each other again and again.
Which might not appear all that dissimilar from what Dos Passos did in Manhattan Transfer, but Doctorow goes a step father – while Dos Passos has a multitude of protagonists they still are individuals with their own, distinct personalities. The fictional protagonists in Ragtime, on the other and, do for the most part not even have names but are family archetypes, Father, Mother, Younger Brother etc. Only very few fictional characters have names, and they without exception are non-white, non-middle class like the Jew Tateh or the negro Coalhouse Walker jr. “Coalhouse” by the way being very close to how an English speaker would pronounce “Kohlhaas,” the titular protagonist of a novella by German 19th century writer Heinrich von Kleist which apparently was the original inspiration for Doctorow’s novel (and there are some interesting connections to be made between the two, not just the – very obvious – similarities in plot). Coalhouse’s identity is borrowed, then, and he remains (just like Kleist’s creation) a very ambivalent character – it never becomes quite clear whether he is confident in his identity as a person of colour or simply imitating the white man.
While Doctorow keeps his fictional characters for the most part anonymous archetypes, there still is a huge amount of name-dropping in Ragtime, as he introduces a large cast of non-fictional, historical figures. The list includes people like Sigmund Freud, Pierpoint Morgan, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini. By turning them into characters in a novel, Doctorow of course fictionalises them, but at the same time he also short-circuits his novel with history. He is of course not the first to have historical characters mix with his fictional ones, that tradition goes as far back as to the very beginning of the genre, to Walter Scott. But I don’t think any other writer has done it with quite the enthusiastic abandon of Ragtime, where we get a veritable parade of them, marching to the novel’s ragged, syncopated rhythm.
The best description of Ragtime is actually to be found in the novel itself, and as it not only precisely captures its feeling and structure but also is beautifully written, I’m going to deviate from my usual habits and quote a bit in closing this review:
“Coalhouse Walker Jr. turned back to the piano and said ‘The Maple Leaf.’ Composed by the great Scott Joplin. The most famous rag of all rang through the air. The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves. This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being.”
The beginning was a little odd for me, but I soon was
Few readers will be fully aware of American history between 1906 and 1914, the historical period in which the novel is set, although this may be different for future readers, once this period is more closely studied and more history books appear about the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Still, many historical characters in the novel are familiar, such as Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. They also help to anchor the story in time. Other, less well-known historical characters can be identified by the way they are described, such as Emma Goldman, and Evelyn Nesbit. The fictional characters, mostly having no name, merely indicated by Father / Tateh, Mother / Mameh, Mother's Younger Brother / Little Girl, makes them iconic or everyman characters.
With limited knowledge of the period, the reader is at the mercy of the author. Some events are likely and believable, such as Emma Goldman's lecture and the ensuing riot. However, other events are highly unlikely, and typical of postmodern fiction, such as the pornographic scene in which Mother's Younger Brother follows and peeps from a closet at Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit's lesbian romp (p.54). The history of the third family, the African-Americans, is confusing because they have names, which pulls them into the realm of the "historical figures" while obviously their actions are fictitious.
While the non-academic reader has some urge, initially, to look up characters, -- now, in the age of Internet and Wikipedia so much easier than in 1975, when the novel was first published, the myriad of characters and events is so dense that one is coerced into giving up that urge and go with the flow of the novel, wondering about the likelihood of events. Reading in that mode, the novel's sweeping scale makes for a very enjoyable read.
This is the type of book you have to get into
While one could say much more about the plot of Ragtime, I find it rather hard to make up my mind of how I like it. Judging by my reading progress I'd say the novel became much more interesting, once the Coalhouse incident happened. At least that is when my reading pace started to pick up. Before that, the novel was not uninteresting but it was a bit tedious to read. Generally, there were a lot of episodes I liked, for example the one with Sigmund Freund and his colleague Jung who visit an amusement park in Coney Island. But then again there were also many parts I had to struggle through and which were just not my cup of tea. This is not so much due to the writing, which is simple at times but generally very readable, but more to the subject matter, I guess.
On the whole, because of its ups and downs, three stars.
Throughout this novel, the family remains nameless; characters are referred to simply as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, and the boy. It's an interesting technique which forces the reader to focus on other aspects of the story. Unfortunately the story itself never really grabbed me and the lack of character development created an emotional distance. I found some aspects of Ragtime intriguing, and appreciate the quality of the writing, but ultimately it fell a bit flat,
Just read it (or don't).
*Have you ever noticed that in popular culture time machines are also place machines? Want to see Ancient Greece? Just hop into a time machine in urban Chicago (or wherever) and you’ll be delivered there. Presuming that time machines can only travel IN TIME, I feel there is an oft-unspoken danger of landing on something, or reforming(?) inside of something that existed in the past. Like in/on a tree, or in a body of water, or on a baby. This is clearly the first time I’ve really thought about time travel as depicted in popular culture, but it seems like this issue should be explored.
In the end, this was an incredibly touching and humorous novel, wonderful both for its reality and an odd sort of optimism that comes out by the conclusion (at least for this reader). As a statement on history and America, as an escape, and as a piece of art, this really is a wonderful novel and a deceptively quick journey. Absolutely recommended.