Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
270 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 27 to August 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Someone (I believe it was Jory, the poet) recommended this one to me way back in the final days of my reading Dark Ages, sometime in 2012 or so. In a sense I could see how this novel would appeal to a poet, with its brevity, its laconic, almost clipped sentences, rarely extending beyond a single clause. Doctorow's brisk recitation of the lives of his characters can be vivid and moving, but is just as often more like the bare framework of a lusher novel left unwritten, rushing through weeks of events within a paragraph. Some resemblance to works of actual history is evident here. Nevertheless, the story is satisfying, provided you buy into the plot contrivance of the various characters continually crossing paths over the space of years -- which, really, could be a critique of much fiction.
Doctorow addresses uncomfortable realities of American history -- the horrors of tenement life, the exploitation of labor, institutional suppression of Black people together with their rights and interests -- directly enough, but with a cloying optimism that makes this a veritable textbook of the White liberal worldview: Things were really bad before, but if we all just work together and get along, things will be great in the future! The endcap, with the three children -- towheaded boy of privilege, sloe-eyed Jewish girl elevated from the slums, bastard child of a Black pianist -- living and playing together in Hollywood harmony, is far from subtle. While undoubtedly the Great American Novel of its time, a reassurance that the turmoil and resentments of its own age would soon be overcome by can-do American spirit and tolerance, Ragtime could be just as applicable to White liberal thought right up until the last few years, when the mere existence of a Black president was enough to unearth the (none too shallow) ugliness and disgusting hatred still rotting through the nation, and the justice system remains scarcely less skewed and violent in its racial prejudices than it was during the 1900s. Ragtime's optimism seems as far from the realities of human (more precisely, American) experience as the anarchic idealism of Red Emma Goldman or the occult Egyptomania of J. P. Morgan, as depicted within the novel. But it's a comforting sort of naivete,
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