![]() There’s a wonderfully, deceptively life-affirming way in which to read all this compulsive connectivity: as a pledge to the idea that, despite appearances, our lives are interdependent in ways we’re unaware of. Washington, Evelyn Nesbit, Coalhouse, Big Bill Haywood, Theodore Dreiser and dozens of others all do their busy jobs side by side. It’s not some sober, long-form, deep-dive effort to recreate the consciousness of, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Gary Gilmore it’s a pageant, a parade, like one of those old photographs of Coney Island on a summer Saturday where it’s so crowded there’s no space for anyone to lie down, or a Richard Scarry-esque spread in which Tateh, Henry Ford, Stanford White, Mother’s Younger Brother, Goldman, Booker T. What sets it apart from other such hybrid conceptions, past and future, is how exuberantly overstuffed it is with these real-life figures. Still, Shawn would not have been wrong in thinking that “Ragtime” represented something new under the literary sun. John Dos Passos, one of Doctorow’s aesthetic fathers, had done something similar in his novels some 40 years earlier, though he did stop short of, for instance, actual sexual congress between the fictional figures and the real ones. (Here, “fictionalization” means not simply that these people are made to do and say things that no historical record indicates they ever did or said, but - much more crucially - that we are given speculative access to their interior lives, their unexpressed thoughts.) This was a bigger deal in 1975 than it seems today according to Doctorow, William Shawn, the venerated editor of The New Yorker, refused to let any full-length review of “Ragtime” run in the magazine, on the grounds that what its author had done was “immoral.” Doctorow might well have pointed out that this supposedly revolutionary breaching of the distinction between real and made-up people had been performed many times before, by Shakespeare, if you please, among others. It’s not about the innovation with which “Ragtime” is most commonly associated, that of the fictionalization of real, famous people. Nothing is too unlikely to delight any and all synchronicities will be permitted in the service of authorial fantasy. Morgan will sit, at different points in the novel, in the same chair. Of course the man hidden in the bedroom closet of the famous anarchist Emma Goldman will turn out to be Mother’s Younger Brother Mother will meet (and eventually marry) Tateh the white family in New Rochelle will open its door to the Black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. Sigmund Freud appears in the novel for only one brief chapter, but in that chapter he will of course cross paths with the fictional immigrant street artist known only as Tateh and his daughter on the streets of the Lower East Side. It’s as densely populated as the tenements it later depicts, and every character’s orbit will intersect with the others’, no matter how divergent their lives. It has the gleefully lunatic recursiveness of a “Seinfeld” episode. It lets us know right away that the comic warp of its narrative will leave no lifelike loose end. ![]() ![]() GREAT NOVELS TEACH us how to read them “Ragtime” is no exception. And in the next paragraph, a car - nay, “a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout” - crashes into a telephone pole in front of the little boy’s house, on that sleepy street in out-of-the-way New Rochelle the unharmed passenger, who then comes to the front door to apologize, is Houdini himself. Though they will all play important roles in the novel, these characters are so conventionally positioned that they are never even given proper names they are Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather and a child known only as “the little boy.” The little boy, we are told, has lately developed a fascination with Harry Houdini, although, being too young to frequent vaudeville houses and the like, he has only read obsessively about the world-famous escape artist, never seen him in the flesh. Its first few pages consist mostly of patient scene setting, reminding us puckishly of all that was different about American life in 1906 (“There was a lot of sexual fainting,” e.g.) while establishing the particulars of a three-story suburban house in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the family that lives there. FOR ALL ITS grounding in history and its exhaustive research, “Ragtime” (1975) immediately announces itself as a fantasy.
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