Customer Reviews

Ragtime

5 star:		(87)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Even before the Broadway musical and the film, Ragtime was E.L. Doctorow's best known work, a celebrated novel that combines the syncopation of ragtime and the literary sensibilities of a writer intrigued by history as literary device. Set primarily in Westchester County's New Rochelle but also in New York City and, briefly, Massachusetts, the novel follows the stories of real and fictional characters as they move from innocence to disillusionment, from peace time to the beginnings of racial conflict and World War I.

Because the novel contains so many stories, some as short as a few pages (in the case of Freud) and some woven throughout the entire novel, describing the plot of the book is a challenge. The author primarily follows the lives of a New Rochelle family (Father, Mother, Younger Brother, and the Little Boy) as they navigate changing times. Father accompanies Peary on his exploration to the North Pole. Mother takes in a young black woman, Sarah, and her newborn, an impulsive act which leads to the introduction of ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and his simple demands which escalate into violence. Younger Brother becomes infatuated with the celebrated beauty Evelyn Nesbit, which in turn leads to his association with anarchist Emma Goldman. Harry Houdini's car breaks down in front of their house, and the novel enters his story as well. The family acts as a touchstone for the disparate stories of a generation. Meanwhile, the story of a counterpart family - Mameh, Tateh, and the Little Girl - unfolds in the ghetto, where the Jewish immigrant family struggles for survival. Unbeknownst to both families, their stories are linked by those of the others.

In syncopated prose that dissipates partway through the novel as the short age of ragtime gives way to jazz, Doctorow manages to infuse irony in short, seemingly unrelated sentences: "Everyone wore white in the summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes." Since the novel is about the loss of the naiveté that gives birth to such generalizations, this kind of set-up allows for the numerous tales that shoot off in different directions.

The complicated novel is not demanding to read, although the huge cast of characters and the emphasis on history makes emotional identification with the characters difficult. If readers look at this novel as an Impressionistic look at life at the beginning of the 20th century, they will find more satisfaction than if they regard it as the story of Little Boy's family. The coherence of this novel comes from the brackets of an era and not from a tidy relation among the plots. I highly recommend this influential novel for serious readers and students of literature.

This book is very amusing, presenting an interesting story as well as portraying nonfictional characters (such as H. Ford, J.P. Morgan,Evelyn Nesbit,and Harry Houdini) in their true identity. One gets to experience the early century and pre-Great War era. Each chapter allows the reader to enter a life of character all intermingled with one plot.

As one reads, the reader experiences the times as an African American, an immigrant, and rich businessmen. What I enjoyed most was the immigrant (Tateh & Daughter) which reminded me of my Great Grandmother's trip into America for the first time.

After reading, I did background research on many characters. For what reason? to see if Doctrow was telling the truth about the nonfictional characters, such as J.P. Morgan. It turns out that Doctrow was on the dot with all characters, which shows the hidden secrets of people we thought we knew.

I find this book very entertaining. Although not recommended for anyone under the age of 16 for some sexual content and vivid descriptions, I think anyone of any age old enoguh, would enjoy the read. It is a very interesting and a page turning history lesson as well as drama.

After reading consider getting the CD for the musical, which very precisely follows the book.

E.L Doctorow's highly readable novels combine history, imagination, character development, a sense of time and place and beautifully controlled and paced writing. Doctorow's relatively early novel, "Ragtime" (1974) remains his best-known work. The book is a delight to read, moves with the feel of ragtime piano, and has a light happy surface. Yet the book combines many disparate threads and stories, a wealth of historical and fictional characters thrown together, and offers an unsettling vision of the United States at the turn of the century, c.1906. There is a complex, multi-layered vision at work here.

The story is told in the first person in the words of Young Boy, whose parents are Father, a successful manufacturer of fireworks and flags in New Rochelle, New York, and Mother, an increasingly frustrated houswife. Mother has a brother, referred to as "Mother's younger brother" who is infatuated with a notorious, (and historical) beauty and femme fatale of the day, Evelyn Nesbit, and who becomes an expert in the use of explosives in Father's fireworks business.

The story of this family slowly intertwines with that of a different American family -- Tateh, a Jewish immigrant from East Europe who at the beginning of the book is struggling as a silouette artist on Hester Street New York City, has young daughter, and Mameh, who through poverty and desparation has abandoned the family for a life of prostitution.

There is a third fictitious American intertwined in the story. Sarah is a young (18 years old) black woman who has a young child that come to live with Mother while Father is away exploring the North Pole with Peary. Mid-way in the novel, we meet the baby's father and Sarah's suitor, an older black man and a pianist named Coalhouse Walker. Coalhouse has studied ragtime with Scott Joplin. The book is redolent with Joplin's music including "Maple Leaf Rag" and "Wall Street Rag." Coalhouse, in his dignity and his violent rage, quickly becomes the chief protagonist of the book. Doctorow has resurrected the character of Coalhouse Walker; and as a much younger man he plays a prominent role in his most recent novel, "The March" (2005), a fictional retelling of Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas in the Civil War.

But these characters and their interlocking stories are only a part of "Ragtime". Doctorow threads their stories in stunningly with stories of historical figures from early 20th Century America. The characters we meet include the escape artist, Harry Houdini, the anarchist Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Roosevelt, Scott Joplin, Evelyn Nesbit, her cuckolded husband, Harry Thaw, and her lover, the architect Stanford White, and several others. Some of these people have prominent roles in the stories while others have cameo parts. But their personalities in virtually every case shine through Doctorow's prose.

For all the elan, rambunctiousness, and lyricism of the story, "Ragtime" presents a picture of a United States plagued by racism, poverty, and violence. The story pivots on Coalhouse Walker's attempts to assert his dignity and manhood in the face of a racial slur in New Rochelle. These efforts lead inexorably to violence and to destruction. The excitement, flow and complexity of the stories carry the reader along but the dark undertow is never absent.

I think Doctorow is at his best in his portrayals of New York City in all its aspects. I was particularly impressed with his portraits of his life in the tenements with Tateh and his daughters, his scenes of the powerful in New York, (J.P Morgan and his meeting with Henry Ford), and the ubiquitous and lovingly-portrayed Emma Goldman. Doctorow's feel for New York City comes through in this book and in many of his later novels, including "Billy Bathgate" and "City of God".

In its musicality, lightness, and depth, "Ragtime" is the work of a great American storyteller. It, and its author, are destined to become American classics.

Robin Friedman

During the first half of Ragtime, I prematurely concluded that this book was incredibly dull. Characters - both fictional and non-fictional - were dropped on the pages like a yo-yo, appearing and disappearing before you could identify their purpose in the story. I could not get attached to the characters - they all seemed like random thoughts with no connection, no development and often no names.

However, after I passed the novel's halfway point, pieces started to fall together, the plot emerged with force, and Doctorow enchanted me with this important novel of the 20th century.

Ragtime is a story about the social lives and forces of the early 1900's. The plot follows a well-to-do white family, an immigrant Jewish father and daughter, and an African-American musician who is hell-bent on seeking revenge against the racial injustice that he endures. Mingled in are historical figures, including Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman and Booker T. Washington, and historical events of the time, such as presidential elections and the start of World War I. As a reader, you get a steady look into the history of this era.

Doctorow flexes his creative muscles in writing this story. One critic described Ragtime as "impressionistic" -an accurate adjective for this novel. Like an artist, Doctorow paints his story but blurs the lines and colors. For most of the novel, you may wonder why this character or event is included. This intrigue motivated me to keep reading - I had to know how it all ends. And Doctorow masterfully draws it all together during the last pages so that everything becomes very relevant and purposeful.

I imagine high school and college students around the country read Ragtime because it's a classic study in foreshadowing, plot and character development, and literary tropes. Certainly, Ragtime requires a patient reader. It waits to pull you in. However, if you stick with it, Ragtime will reward you with a marvelous social tale of our country's past.

A powerful evocation of the pre-World War I period in America. Doctorow painfully dramatizes (as well as personalizes) the social abuses of the latter 19th Century but still manages to re-affirm the possibilities inherent in the American dream. The focus is on a single, not-so-typical American family, although such luminaries of the era as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, and Pierpont Morgan also appear as minor characters. Father goes on an expedition to the North Pole and comes back with more than he bargained for. Mother's brother becomes embroiled in a torrid love affair with a notorious beauty who has played a significant role in a famous murder case. And the main plot line shows how the entire family is endangered (and has their lives dramatically changed) by their involvement in a black family's fight for due process.

But this isn't as small a novel as "To Kill a Mockingbird". Doctorow's focus on the family and the personal side of these events is only the lynchpin that holds together a sweeping, wide-ranging look at turn-of-the-century society as a whole. Perhaps not since "War and Peace" has one novel so successfully combined the intimately personal with the grand scope of history. Politics, racism, sexual mores, yellow journalism, corruption, the entertainment revolution, terrorism, labor relations: all pass under Doctorow's analytical gaze. Easy to read and not overlong, this would be a great book for high school students to read in learning about pre-War American society, if it weren't for the sexual content, which is higher than average for a work of this kind. As it is, this novel is episodic enough that teachers could assign excerpts without killing the power of the whole book. Very highly recommended.

I would differ slightly with Eddie P.(who's insights I appreciate) who likened the novel to Fitzgerald's or Lewis' and say it has more in common with John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. The vignettes Doctorow draws for us have a great deal in common, I believe, with Dos Passos' snapshots. In answer to Banger's question about why this time period, I would suggest that this is an era that is generally regarded in the American historical consciousness as being primarily bucolic and carefree. The nation, relatively innocent, having shaken off the aftereffects of the civil war, has recently won the spurious Spanish-American war, and is generally revelling in a sense of purpose and civility. What Doctorow is suggesting is that this serene surface was already infected, with a host of social ills festering beneath it. A shift was occuring that would lead to labor riots, race riots, change in mores (sexual attitudes), loss of faith in institutions, etc. that would define the 20th century. If this were all of Doctorow's plan however, it would have been interesting Sociology, but a pretty boring novel. Doctorow is above all an interesting storyteller. He knows how to keep a plot moving and how to invest it with enough intellectual hardware to make the reader feel that his/her time has been worth the effort. He can bring a scene to life with a few fresh (never shopworn) details. He doesn't spend a great deal of time elabortaing over these details, as James or Wolfe do, but he makes the reader just as cognizant of them. A few brushstrokes and we are there. His writing is cinematic, in that we can "see" the scene he is depicting, without burdening us with excess verbiage. This is the hallmark of a really good author. Ragtime is a primary example of this kind of shorthand acumen. The novel flashes by as seen in a kinescope. I, for one, was delighted I had inserted my nickle.

Doctorow's historical novel, Ragtime, cracks this century's top 100 novels around position 75. The story, whose setting is in New York during the early 1900's, has several non-fictional characters in it. The reader catches a personal look at escape artist Houdini, investor and millionaire J.P. Morgan, mechanical inventor Henry Ford, and feminist Emma Goldman.

Inadvertently, these characters play an important part in causing an event that involved a Negro looking for justice. Coalhouse Walker was a ragtime musician whose car was wrecked by jealous firemen. Walker, seeking restoration of his car, escalates the fight after going to authorities. He fails to find justice and eventually a group of his men hold Morgan's museum / library in New York City as hostage and cause a stand off until the leader of the firemen restores his car.

At the start, the reader is lead to think he is getting an expose into the lives that made the early 1900's. However, there is a sense that Doctorow is taking the reader somewhere, but it isn't revealed until midway. Doctorow has done his research and captures the turmoil and amazement of the period perfectly. If you like this period of American History, this book will certainly interest you.

This is an absolutely amazing story, full of life, detail, and sensation. Written in a convergent style, the first half introduces the characters, and the second half draws the story together in a sequence of powerful events. This book is so powerful it left me stunned after I had finnished. One simply cannot catch all of the subtleties Doctorow entertwines into the story the first read-through. This is not your typical historical fiction. The style is remarkably fresh, and leaves the reader with the feel of the 20's inside of them like a brand on the heart. But most importantly, the themes presented in the novel transcend time and space, reaching the very heart of human nature and behavior. If you want to experience an unparalleled example of interwoven destinies, you must read this book!!!

Ragtime is the story of various levels of American society in about the first decade of the 20th century, a period Doctorow dubs "The Age Of Ragtime" after the popularity of the music Scott Joplin and other composers are writing at this time. In this curious novel, we meet real and invented people interacting on a taut little stage. Here we find Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Harry Thaw, Booker T. Washington and other famous and infamous men and women from this time, and we also meet some archetypal constructs known to us by such designations as "Father" "Younger Brother" "Mother" etc. There is the upper-class white family from New Rochelle, headed by an explorer father; there is the ambitious, hard working Jewish family, new to America's shores, headed by a kind-hearted man whose brain teems with ideas for inventions; and there is a black "family" composed of an unwed father and mother (a Ragtime pianist, and a young woman who is eventually taken in by the white family) and an infant son. The bulk of the story of Ragtime trickles through the lives of these people, and passes notoriously through passion-fueled murder, bigotry, accidental killings, social glory, revolutionary schemes, and acts of---justified?---terrorism. Ragtime moves so far away from the plot of its beginnings it is impossible to predict its destination, a reader merely hangs on for the bumpy, wavering ride through our American nation in its teenaged years.

This was required reading when I was in college and I wasn't optimistic going in. Then I got past the first two chapters and was hooked! Brilliant story, great and believable characters, and interesting historical facts (just enough to make it even more interesting) was what sold me. By the time I finished I was sorry the book had to end. This is Doctorow's best effort and a must read for anyone. Regardless of what genre you're into, this is a fun book, like Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, McCrae's Bark of the Dogwood, or Brown's Da Vinci Code.

Also recommended: The Da Vinci Code, Bark of the Dogwood, To Kill a Mockingbird