Book Tamers| book reviews

How a century begins

Apparently, the further we go from the 20th century, the more we are tempted to recreate the past into fiction, to imagine it or to go to already common and comfortable representations, that show us that then it was better, in other words, we tend to idealize it. E.L. Doctorow’s novel is dealing with the thought that then it was better, referring to America in the first two decades of the century, using little means and an honest and clear style.
From the point of view of the illusions, it wasn’t better then. The beginning of the 20th century in America, as in Doctorow’s novel, is nothing but racism, it means poverty and misery, it is inequity and discrimination. On the other hand, and maybe this is more important, the ragtime years are a mix of reality and fiction, a world where everything is possible, when one can hope, when one can honestly believe and live impulsively.

That is why considering the main three histories in Ragtime as symbols of an uncertain reality is not far from the truth, although Doctorow’s unsubtle fictionalization was blamed.
In New Rochelle, the family of Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother and the Boy are forming a middle class family, having clear moral principles and progressive views, caught up to a point in habitudes and prejudices. On the other side, Mameh, Tateh and the Little Girl are, according to expectations, the classic immigrants, the victims or the winners of the American Dream. Finally, Sarah and Coalhouse Walker, whose drama is described over the novel’s second half, are characters ideally built in order to point out the situation of the black people at the beginning of the century. Actually, if it weren’t for the dry, ironic tone, Doctorow could be blamed for using cliché images in a demonstrative book.

Ragtime is not all about these three histories, which are however sufficiently extended and detailed, but also it deals with historic characters, like Jung and Freud, Houdini, as one of the most brilliant portraits in the novel, and also, it is about passionate murders, like that of Harry K. Thaw – the millionaire who killed Stanford White, his wife’s lover. One can’t ignore Emma Goldman’s portrait, an anarchist preacher, a wild and strange mix of independence, conformism and defiance.

The encounter between Henry Ford and the wealthiest man in America, J.P Morgan, is relevant for the alert atmosphere, of passing and of change of the decades: it is about the meeting of two very different personalities, and any understanding between them is out of the question, there are two business styles, a pragmatic and an aristocratic one, well, two different ways of seeing the world. This meeting is actually the miniature meeting between two worlds: the old one, sentimental, passionate, and hypocrite and the new one, brave, honest and insensitive.

The American novel

I think that any regular description of an American novel goes for Ragtime also. It is about that novel that is a little known by everybody, it is a novel that lives through some features, it is the novel that sells (thus, it is named commercial), it is the ambitious novel, that wants to swallow the whole world, that doesn’t content itself in dissecting only one aspect of reality, but wants and can do more (thus, it is called a mix without the sense of proportion). Even more interesting is the way of narrative organization: it’s a correct and honest one, it doesn’t shine but through irony, and that is why it is flattering for the characters and the events. Maybe it is the only way of comprising the great number of details and characters, to connect them in fiction logic.

One good example is rendered by Harry Houdini’s portrait, the Jew illusionist able to break through every captivity, to get out of a safe, of a milk can, prison cells, spectacular and restless at the same time. His wish of escape grows with the difficulty of his performances, and it is not slowed down neither by airplane flight, nor by stunning freedom rendered by air escapades. It’s like he can’t make the difference between real life and tricks. The same thing can be said about Mother’s need of escape from her passive role of a wife; about the Younger Brother who bonds with a new system, created ad-hoc by Coalhouse Walker; about the Father who goes with Peary’s expedition at the North Pole and comes back weary and captive. Each character is constrained by himself, by circumstances, by principles, and the greatest idea is that only death and freedom are equal; everything else is nothing but a surrogate.

I recommend Ragtime not just because it is a serious idea that gets behind the narration- thus it appears as threateningly compulsory, but because Doctorow is very generous towards the reader. Sketching portraits, possibilities, masking confessions, he gives the reader the occasion of imagining the text and beyond the text, to continue and to develop the story. I think Ragtime can be a catalyst for one’s own imagination.

Written by Mihaela