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Ragtime: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels) Paperback – Bargain Price, May 8, 2007
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Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateMay 8, 2007
- Dimensions5.18 x 0.69 x 7.9 inches
- ISBN-100812978188
- ISBN-13978-0812978186
- Lexile measure930L
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Mother's Younger Brother was in love with Evelyn Nesbit. He had closely followed the scandal surrounding her name and had begun to reason that the death of her lover Stanford White and the imprisonment of her husband Harry K. Thaw left her in need of the attentions of a genteel middle-class young man with no money. He thought about her all the time. He was desperate to have her. In his room pinned on the wall was a newspaper drawing by Charles Dana Gibson entitled 'The Eternal Question.' It showed Evelyn in profile, with a profusion of hair, one thick strand undone and fallen in the configuration of a question mark. Her downcast eye was embellished with a fallen ringlet that threw her brow in shadow. Her nose was delicately upturned. Her mouth was slightly pouted. Her long neck curved like a bird taking wing. Evelyn Nesbit had caused the death of one man and wrecked the life of another and from that he deduced that there was nothing in life worth having, worth wanting, but the embrace of her thin arms.
The afternoon was a blue haze. Tidewater seeped into his footprints. He bent down and found a perfect shell specimen, a variety not common to western Long Island Sound. It was a voluted pink and amber shell the shape of a thimble, and what he did in the hazy sun with the salt drying on his ankles was to throw his head back and drink the minute amount of sea water in the shell. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes, and behind him at the land end of the marsh, out of sight behind the tall grasses, the distant bell of the North Avenue streetcar tolled its warning.
Across town the little boy in the sailor suit was suddenly restless and began to measure the length of the porch. He trod with his toe upon the runner of the cane-backed rocking chair. He had reached that age of knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not expected by the adults around him and consequently goes unrecognized. He read the newspaper daily and was currently following the dispute between the professional baseballers and a scientist who claimed that the curve ball was an optical illusion. He felt that the circumstances of his family's life operated against his need to see things and to go places. For instance he had conceived an enormous interest in the works and career of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. But he had not been taken to a performance. Houdini was a headliner in the top vaudeville circuits. His audiences were poor people--carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.
The little boy stood at the end of the porch and fixed his gaze on a bluebottle fly traversing the screen in a way that made it appear to be coming up the hill from North Avenue. The fly flew off. An automobile was coming up the hill from North Avenue. As it drew closer he saw it was a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout. He ran along the porch and stood at the top of the steps. The car came past his house, made a loud noise and swerved into the telephone pole. The little boy ran inside and called upstairs to his mother and father. Grandfather woke with a start. The boy ran back to the porch. The driver and the passenger were standing in the street looking at the car: it had big wheels with pneumatic tires and wooden spokes painted in black enamel. It had brass headlamps in front of the radiator and brass sidelamps over the fenders. It had tufted upholstery and double side entrances. It did not appear to be damaged. The driver was in livery. He folded back the hood and a geyser of white steam shot up with a hiss.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (May 8, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0812978188
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812978186
- Lexile measure : 930L
- Item Weight : 8.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.18 x 0.69 x 7.9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #41,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #83 in Deals in Books
- #5,448 in Historical Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career [places] him . . . in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
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Don't want to be a spoiler, so I don't cite the story around Coalhouse Walker here. But I want to say his story doesn't feel old or out of time when you read in this era, 2019 America, although the story is about an America before WWI (Doctorow mentioned the gossip story about many American celebrities around that era). My experience of reading the story is at the start I felt the mini-stories around the celebrities and the antagonist's family quite trivial (though enjoyable). Then, right from the moment Coalhouse Walker stepped into the scene I felt the rhythm of the story tonality change suddenly. And I found his reaction to what happened to him absurd, unimportant, him over the board, just like the characters around him felt. Then step by step Doctorow showed me that no I'm wrong. It's important. It's minor, but it's important, and his reaction's reasonable and justifiable. And finally, I felt I learned it. The more time I think of it the more I feel that I learned it. Some authors like to say Reading fiction teaches one empathy. And reading this book I experience what this quote actually means.
Surprisingly, that rage didn't fade since Doctorow wrote this book. The rage is still here around America, the contemporary America. Likewise, American white, as those fictional characters in the story, adopt the same burlesque attitude towards what the Black America is still encountering with every day. And we have an American president who's embodied the soul of the Chief Fireman in the story. It makes the story surprisingly relatable to our times.
Highly recommend it.
"It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction."
"Ragtime" is set in pre-WWI America where technological innovation, industrialization, and immigration were converging to bring about a new world that had not yet come fully into focus. The Model T shared the road with horse-drawn fire wagons, assembly-lined factories employed masses of fungible workers who enjoyed few rights, and just 50 years after the Civil War African Americans were ascending into the ranks of the educated middle class and, on the way up, were confronted with vicious racism. Add to this mix the advent of mass entertainment, Freudian sexual awareness, and socialism and you have a time of disorienting social change.
The narrative is centered around a WASPy family's experience with Coalhouse Walker, Jr., an African American ragtime piano player. Without introducing spoilers, Coalhouse Walker is wronged and - in defending his honor - forces the WASPy family headlong into the rushing currents of the time.
What kept me from giving this 5 stars? Maybe it was the pacing and plot development. Multiple story lines are launched and slowly converge as the book reaches the end. At times, this approach felt tedious. But right when a yawn was coming on, Doctorow would slay me with a line like this:
"His grief for Sarah and the life they might have had was hardened into a ceremony of vengeance in the manner of the ancient warrior."
This is the fourth Doctorow book I've read. (The others are "The March", "Loon Lake", and "The Waterworks") The man is clearly a gifted writer and story teller. The book was published in 1975. After finishing the book, I found myself wondering how the world of the early 1970s might have influenced the book's theme.
T: @jrmattox
It is a great story, a mixture of fact and fiction set in the Ragtime era (roughly, 1906 to 1914) and centered in the New York City area. The novel evokes its period and place as well as the best historical fiction. It also spotlights what probably was the defining social issue of the time - the conflict between capital and labor, the wealthy and the poor. But what makes RAGTIME special is the narrative style: prose that is simple and pared down, yet taut and propulsive. While the story might have minor flaws, not so the prose. It is a stylistic tour de force.
The central characters of the novel are all fictional. But a handful of historical figures - Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, and Charles S. Whitman - have significant roles in the novel and are each given highly imaginative character re-constructions. (The portrayal of J.P. Morgan in Chapter 19 - "He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted." -- is superb.) And then there are a slew of additional historical figures who make cameo appearances, from Sigmund Freud to Admiral Peary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Big Bill Haywood, even Charles Victor Faust.
RAGTIME, like almost all of Doctorow's novels, raises questions about how far should an author go in mixing fact and fiction, history and fantasy. In his most recent novel, "Homer & Langley", I thought Doctorow went too far, but I don't feel that way about RAGTIME, which arguably is even looser in its distortions of history. How can I explain that seeming contradiction? I think because the central characters of RAGTIME - the anonymous narrator and his family, Tateh and his daughter, and Coalhouse Walker, Jr. - are all clearly fictional. Given that, it is easier for me to accept that, yes, Emma Goldman could have been big sister to Evelyn Nesbit, J.P. Morgan could have discussed the secrets of life with Henry Ford, and Harry Houdini could have shown off his flying skills in his Voisin biplane to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie.
In any event, RAGTIME certainly should be read by anyone interested in the art of historical fiction, as well as, I think, anyone who wishes to be conversant with the best American fiction of the past half century.
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Set mostly in New York from the turn of the century to the US’s belated entry to the First World War, a cavalcade of characters parade across the pages, many fictional, many real, their lives separate but crossing and impacting each on the others. Through them we get a kaleidoscopic vision of a fractured American society, full of extremes – wealth, poverty, get rich quick and get poor quicker, slums and mansions, warmongers and peacemakers, capitalism, socialism, anarchism and patriotism, psychoanalysis, spiritualism, race and civil rights. JP Morgan, Harry Houdini, Booker T Washington, Stanford White, Sigmund Freud – a roll call of the famous whose names have lived on, mixed with those who were headliners in their day but whose fame has faded, and some fictional characters so well drawn and smoothly fitted in that I frequently couldn’t work out who was real and who fictional.
At the centre is a family, named only by their family position – Mother, Father, Little Boy and Mother’s Younger Brother. These characters are used to provide tenuous links to all the others and, in some sense perhaps, to show the impact of the movers and shakers on “ordinary” people. Father leaves his business of manufacturing fireworks and patriotic flags in the hands of Mother’s Younger Brother while he goes off to join Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. Mother’s Younger Brother becomes involved first with Evelyn Nesbit (wife of Harry K Thaw who murdered Stanford White) and then with anarchist Emma Goldman. A second family we meet, linked via Evelyn Nesbit, are a Jewish father and daughter, again unnamed. Through Tateh, the father, we are taken to the world of industrial strife in Pennsylvania and later into the new world of the movies.
This all led me to believe that all fictional characters were unnamed, so that when Coalhouse Walker, Jr., appeared I was convinced, wrongly, that he must have been real. A black musician, his pride and joy is his brand-new Ford, but then as now, a black man in a big car is a target for racists. Gradually Coalhouse’s story takes centre stage, as he reaches a point where he can no longer tolerate the unfairness of a society that pretends that black people are citizens with rights while treating them as less than human and expecting them to quietly submit. In his story is all the howl of rage that still reverberates a hundred years on from the setting and fifty years after this book was published: from Booker T Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr., to George Floyd and BLM – from bending the knee, to the knee on the neck, to taking a knee. All the humour, all the playfulness, all the quick changes of tone and rhythm that Doctorow uses to make his book an entertaining syncopated rag, can’t dissipate or disguise the angry power of Coalhouse’s story.
It took me a while to get into the book. The first section mostly concerns the unnamed family and Mother’s Younger Brother’s obsession with Evelyn Nesbit, and is full of the American male mid-20th century authors’ obsession with sex. Here we go again, I thought. Lots of famous names touched on and so many themes thrown out there, shallowly and without substance – socialism and capitalism, unions, the place of women, Freud and Jung, Houdini and spectacle – those jigsaw pieces fall thick and fast. But gradually it becomes clear the depth comes not from the individual incidents or characters but from the whole picture as it begins to form. Are the stories he tells about the real characters true? Did Houdini really start debunking spiritualists because of his excessive love for his dead mother? Did JP Morgan really believe that an elite, of whom he is, of course, one, is reincarnated in each generation to rule the world? Did Harry K Thaw really escape from prison by using a technique he learned from Houdini? Did Freud and Jung really ride the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island together? I felt I could spend the rest of my life googling, and then I realised it didn’t matter – I didn’t care about the literal truth of these things because they felt real in the context of the book and worked as metaphors for this frenzied, erratic, rapidly evolving society.
"Despite such experiences Houdini never developed what we think of as a political consciousness. He could not reason from his own hurt feelings. To the end he would be almost totally unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life. He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss. He was passionately in love with his ancient mother whom he had installed in his brownstone home on West 113th Street. In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln, and James McNeill Whistler. Of course Freud's immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America for ever."
I originally planned to read this as part of my long-ago quest to find The Great American Novel. I don’t know that I’d quite class it as that but I’d certainly call it A Great American Novel, which both entertains and gives a lot of insight into the US psyche and its never-ending pursuit of that nebulous thing we call the American Dream.