![]() ![]() With one exception – a luncheon meeting between Ford and Morgan – the appearance of these historical figures feels unforced and plausible. In the course of the novel we’ll meet the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Henry Ford, J.P. Five pages in, and Doctorow is already off to the races. Thaw was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated beauty who had once been Stanford White’s mistress.” A few lines later Emma Goldman, the revolutionary, strolls onto the page. Soon after that, Harry Houdini wrecks his car, “a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout,” in front of the family’s house in New Rochelle. ![]() Thaw, eccentric scion of a coke and railroad fortune. In New York City the papers were full of the shooting of the famous architect Stanford White by Harry K. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes. The gambit unfolds like this: “Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. This allows Doctorow to immerse the reader in the seamless atmosphere of a particular place and time. In the middle of the novel’s long opening paragraph, Doctorow plays the gambit that will become the novel’s signature and the source of its enduring influence on the way many American novelists work right up to today: he starts injecting historical figures into his fictional world. The paragraphs are long, unbroken by quoted dialog. The novel was stylistically innovative in other ways. The strategy is crucial to everything that will follow. But three sentences after the intimate introduction of “Father,” Doctorow switches to the impersonal third-person plural and tells us that after “the family” took possession of the house, it seemed that “their” days would be warm and fair. It is a deft shift of focus, a quiet, barely noticeable pulling back, but it gives Doctorow the freedom to have it both ways – to paint miniatures on a broad canvas. Later references to “Grandfather” and “Mother” and “Mother’s Younger Brother” and “the Little Boy” reinforce the familial sleight of hand. ![]() When we learn that “Father” built this house, we assume that the man’s son or daughter is narrating the story. More subtly – and crucially – Doctorow also establishes a slippery narrative voice, which will be a key to the novel’s success. The key word in this passage is seemed, for it hints that this stout manse will not be able to provide the stability it promises. In just four deceptively simple sentences, Doctorow has established the novel’s tone and central strategy. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. To heighten the trauma, Doctorow first builds a nearly pastoral world. In Ragtime he takes us back to the years immediately preceding the First World War, when America and much of the world lived in a state of dreamy innocence, oblivious that twinned calamities loomed. The book’s theme, as I read it, is that such innocence is an untenable luxury, then and now, and its inevitable loss is always laced with trauma, pain, and bloodshed. In other novels he has taken us back to the Wild West ( Welcome to Hard Times, 1960), the Civil War ( The March, 2005), post-bellum New York City ( The Waterworks, 1994), the Depression ( World’s Fair, 1985, winner of the National Book Award Loon Lake, 1980 and Billy Bathgate, 1989), and the Cold War ( The Book of Daniel, 1971). Ragtime, like so much of Doctorow’s fiction, is pinned to a particular, acutely rendered moment in American history. And I would argue that this has also been his most influential book, the one that has done more than all the others to change the way American authors approach the writing of novels. While I wouldn’t presume to single out one of Doctorow’s dozen novels or story collections as his “best” book, I do think it is fair to say that, so far, his best known and best loved work is the novel Ragtime. The award formalized something legions of readers have known for more than half a century: E.L. Doctorow received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On that night he joined a rarefied posse of past recipients that includes Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, Stephen King, Tom Wolfe, John Ashbery, and Elmore Leonard, among others. At the National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on November 2, E.L. ![]()
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