by E.L. Doctorow
A fascinating novel of decadence and the veneer of convention, of love and vengeance in the early 20th century.
Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple
How do you capture the spirit of an age fundamentally different from our own? What did New York feel like in 1906? According to Ragtime, the rich hardly knew the poor existed, or at least they managed to ignore the boats full of immigrants while the poor struggled in miserable tenement conditions. The air was laden with portents linking sex and death: sexual fainting, "runaway women [dying] in the rigors of ecstasy." Harry Houdini’s escape feats awed the masses; patriotic gatherings with flag waving and fireworks were the order of the day. Trust me: E.L. Doctorow’s writing is much more sensual and atmospheric than my cursory summary.
The book is written in long flowing paragraphs of description with little dialogue. But it’s important to read the paragraphs carefully because an emotional development, e.g. a surprise with unforeseeable ramifications, can be buried in a seemingly descriptive passage.
The descriptive prose is evocative. For instance, the newfangled sounds of ragtime music: "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."
Does it work to mix characters who really lived (whose motivations and thoughts a writer can only guess at) with fictional ones (here called for instance Mother, Father, and Mother’s Younger Brother)? Well, it does here. You come away with a real feeling that you understand what it felt like to live at this time – very rich and very poor Americans separately and together, violence, sex and the inexplicable supernatural lurking not far beneath the surface. And you learn about the radical socialism or anarchism preached by Emma Goldman, about Houdini uncovering spiritualist fakes in his attempt to make contact with his deceased mother, about J.P. Morgan’s eccentricity. The lives of the fictional and historically real characters intertwine, and though highly improbable it works in the novel’s context.
The conditions of the time are satirized: "Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They were valued everywhere they were employed. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert."
An interesting add-on: the book’s core story of a righteous man’s quest for justice – Coalhouse Walker, Jr., black ragtime pianist, seeks to avenge with drastic acts the disrespect he receives from the New Rochelle Fire Department – is based quite exactly on an eminently readable German literary classic, Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810).
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Ragtime
Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003
Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
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