Ragtime: A Novel
First published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be—a singular tapestry hailed as “an extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of the country” (The New Yorker) between the turn of the century and the First World War.
Selected by the Modern Library and The Guardian as one of the 100 best novels of all time
The inspiration for the Tony Award–winning musical!
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.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
I think this is a re-read. (I know it was assigned to me at one point in undergrad any way, and I remember reading some of it, but the end was a bit unfamiliar.)
This book has passages of really intelligent plotting and character interactions that really bring out the crazy era of the early decades of the 20th century in America - the immigrant experience, the early middle class, the technology, the robber barons, extreme inequality, the beginning of truly mass media sensationalism, the obsession with and of radicals and revolutionaries - and it interweaves them pretty masterfully, although it comes at a cost.
That cost is that you very rarely get truly played out dramatic scenes with exchanges of dialogue. That is certainly a choice, and I guess I understand that Doctorow is trying to keep the focus on history, making it feel like the characters are walking myths or types of people endemic to the era. But it also detracts somewhat from the ability to invest in the characters, and that limits your emotional engagement with the story. For most people. For me. This was especially true with the Mother, the Younger Brother, and the Father and the Boy. They just didn't feel like people to me, but they also didn't feel like stereotypes/archetypes. The other characters all did, but not the family we spend at least 1/3 of the time of the novel with. Which challenges the attention span a bit.
You also get really beautiful passages that tie up thematic strands or ironize core American ideas. But then you also get sentences like this: "What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness." It took a while to decode that one (relatively speaking). I practically had to diagram it. There's also a lot of grammatical confusion due to the combination of the abstract character names with the lack of quotations. You get sentences like this: "Father said I myself require nothing from you." What it should be is "The Father said, 'I myself require nothing of you'." or maybe "The Father told the Younger brother that he didn't require anything." but even that gets a little ambiguous. There's a decent amount of that sort of interaction between abstract nouns and a lack of conventional markers for decoding syntactical relationships.
The impersonality of the narration also creates some balancing issues. It is kept impersonal in order to emphasize the historical framing of the whole tale. But Doctorow still wants you to empathize with the characters, so he will spend a few pages really getting into the head of a specific character - for example how Tateh feels about his daughter (who never speaks a word and has no personality that we can see). These two focuses - impersonal history and psychological experience - don't naturally fit together, at least not in the narrative style Doctorow is using.
But despite all those flaws, the book is still very engaging and memorable. It reads fairly quickly. Overall it is worth your time.
This book has passages of really intelligent plotting and character interactions that really bring out the crazy era of the early decades of the 20th century in America - the immigrant experience, the early middle class, the technology, the robber barons, extreme inequality, the beginning of truly mass media sensationalism, the obsession with and of radicals and revolutionaries - and it interweaves them pretty masterfully, although it comes at a cost.
That cost is that you very rarely get truly played out dramatic scenes with exchanges of dialogue. That is certainly a choice, and I guess I understand that Doctorow is trying to keep the focus on history, making it feel like the characters are walking myths or types of people endemic to the era. But it also detracts somewhat from the ability to invest in the characters, and that limits your emotional engagement with the story. For most people. For me. This was especially true with the Mother, the Younger Brother, and the Father and the Boy. They just didn't feel like people to me, but they also didn't feel like stereotypes/archetypes. The other characters all did, but not the family we spend at least 1/3 of the time of the novel with. Which challenges the attention span a bit.
You also get really beautiful passages that tie up thematic strands or ironize core American ideas. But then you also get sentences like this: "What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness." It took a while to decode that one (relatively speaking). I practically had to diagram it. There's also a lot of grammatical confusion due to the combination of the abstract character names with the lack of quotations. You get sentences like this: "Father said I myself require nothing from you." What it should be is "The Father said, 'I myself require nothing of you'." or maybe "The Father told the Younger brother that he didn't require anything." but even that gets a little ambiguous. There's a decent amount of that sort of interaction between abstract nouns and a lack of conventional markers for decoding syntactical relationships.
The impersonality of the narration also creates some balancing issues. It is kept impersonal in order to emphasize the historical framing of the whole tale. But Doctorow still wants you to empathize with the characters, so he will spend a few pages really getting into the head of a specific character - for example how Tateh feels about his daughter (who never speaks a word and has no personality that we can see). These two focuses - impersonal history and psychological experience - don't naturally fit together, at least not in the narrative style Doctorow is using.
But despite all those flaws, the book is still very engaging and memorable. It reads fairly quickly. Overall it is worth your time.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.