#Ragtime el doctorow quotes serial
#Ragtime el doctorow quotes full

Like Houdini's audiences, I am made to enjoy being fooled. I, for one, although no friend of that aberration, am willing to forgive any historical novelist who makes his flights from historical fact as funny and pertinent as Doctorow makes his. This mixture of fact and fiction may confuse or mislead the unwary or historically uninformed reader, and it suggests a projection onto the past of the suspect techniques of the New Journalism. Morgan and Henry Ford having a hilarious dialogue about reincarnation, and Morgan in Egypt fighting bedbugs on his deathbed.

We see Thaw in the Tombs exposing himself to the astonished magician Harry Houdini (who figures as a recurring motif). Thaw killed the famous architect Stanford White, being seduced, more or less, by anarchist leader Emma Goldman. We see Evelyn Nesbit, a young beauty for the love of whom Harry K. That is the plot and the reviewer has no compunction about recounting it, because, as to both physical and emotional content, it occupies a comparatively small part of 'Ragtime.' It is a fable that serves as an excuse for a great deal of social observation, and for the introduction of numerous real historical people, each of whom Doctorow (best known previously for 'The Book of Daniel') freely and happily gives his own utterly unhistorical twists. Coalhouse, who has been promised safe conduct, walks out into the street and is gunned down by police. Morgan mansion and library in New York City, demanding that Coalhouse's automobile be returned to him in its original condition. Finally the Coalhouse Gang executes its climactic act of defiance against the white world: It invades and takes possession of the J.P. A New York newspaper, unable to find a picture of Walker, prints one of Scott Joplin and labels it Walker.

#Ragtime el doctorow quotes full

It is full of coincidences and implausibilities that is because, like ragtime, it is not about life but about a dream of life.Īfter first blowing up a couple of New Rochelle firehouses, the Coalhouse Gang becomes notorious. Its narrative style is unorthodox consisting entirely of indirect discourse with no dialogue and a point of view that is neither subjective nor omniscient, merely reportorial but then, ragtime music was so unsettling to orthodox listeners that they had to pigeonhole it as whorehouse music.

#Ragtime el doctorow quotes serial

Its hero, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker Jr., is not introduced until about halfway through - hardly within the rules for the 'well-made novel.' But the device is perfectly within them for well-made ragtime, which is characterized by the serial introduction of entirely new themes.

'Ragtime' is basically the story of an upper middle class white family in New Rochelle, New York, and its black servant and her daughter and lover, in the years 1902-1913.

Because it is not a novel about ragtime but a novel in ragtime. Why, then, begin a review of it with a paragraph about ragtime music? Because this is a novel clearly inspired by that music and by the queer light it throws on the time in which it flourished and suffused with its mood and almost its rhythms. 'Ragtime' isn't a novel about ragtime music indeed, ragtime music is barely mentioned in passing.