About this title: Doctorow's novel takes place in turn-of-the-century New York, and mingles real-life and fictional characters. The plot involves the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White intrigue, but also includes a black musician and his girlfriend, a Jewish peddler on the Lower East Side, and a coterie of wealthy Anglo-Saxons in pursuit of wealth. Time magazine called ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 1975
ISBN-13:9780394469010ISBN:0394469011
Description: Good in good dust jacket. DJ has small tears around edges, binding is slightly tilted, pages are clean and unmarked. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 270 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1975
ISBN-13:9780553149708ISBN:0553149709
Description: Good. Spine has some creases. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good Grade B reading copy. Binding is Mass Market Paperback. Pages tanning. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Publishing Group, New York, New York, U.S. A
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780449214282ISBN:0449214281
"I wanted to read this again having seen the brilliant revival of the musical version, because I had read the book before and not been tremendously impressed. Now, more familiar with Doctorow's style, I was definitely more impressed. Doctorow's style is bleak - he writes a story with the matter-of-fact prose of a historical account. As such, it is hard to get very close to his characters; although you know the stories of their lives, you never feel as though you're more than an arm's distance away. Also, perhaps more than any other modern writer I can think of, Doctorow is not afraid to throw entirely horrible character traits and actions into the mix of sympathetic characters, which is bold (Tateh's treatment of his wife? Oof.) That all being said, the scope of this novel is impressive. You do feel, reading it, that he has captured a time in America's history in a breadth that is impressive for a relatively short novel. And ultimately, his brusque prose helps him achieve this; your distance from the characters allows you to see the whole better."
"First of all, it bears saying that Doctorow is an exceptional writer. His prose is lean yet evocative and exceptionally effective. Ragtime is a page-turner. The plot is unwieldy and in the hands of a lesser storyteller would fail abysmally. It succeeds, more or less for all the same reasons a well-wrought hardboiled mystery succeeds: the action propels the reader forward. That said, Ragtime has far FAR more flaws than strengths. While reading I was constantly reminded of Thomas Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. Carlyle's charm was that he wrote a first rate nineteenth century novel and expected us to accept it as history. Doctorow's failure is that he wrote a second rate revisionist history of the early decades of the twentieth century and expects us to accept it as fiction.
The greater number of Ragtime's characters are real historical personages, ranging from the sex-kitten Evelyn Nesbitt to Harry Houdini to the anarchist activist Emma Goldman, and while I have to tip my hat to Doctorow's ambition, I can't say he pulls any of it off. We cannot speak about "Doctorow's Houdini" or "Doctorow's J.P. Morgan" as we can "Shakespeare's Caesar" as opposed to "Plutarch's Caesar" as opposed to the historical Caesar. Shakespeare and Plutarch painted character interpretations of historical personages. Doctorow tells us nothing about Morgan, Henry Ford, Houdini, or Nesbitt we couldn't learn better from a history or even a period newspaper. These historical characters are utterly superficial in Doctorow's hands. The only exception is Emma Goldman, who, apparently, was a blustering, narrow-minded, pedantic bitch, if we're to take Doctorow's "interpretation" at face value. In fact, the only remotely interesting thing Doctorow says about any of his historical personages comes quite early in the novel in a five page long chapter concerning Sigmund Freud, who then disappears never to be seen again. Doctorow points out that the generation in question was, because of Freud, the last generation of Americans not to be ashamed of loving their own mother. Freud, Doctorow tells us, ruined sex in America. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly interesting, and it is Ragtimes one shining moment of the novels ability to recast history.
Ultimately, the problem with Ragtime is that it clocks in at a mere 266 pages. Doctorow's ambition was to write a grand, sweeping, all encompassing epic of the early twentieth century a la Les Miserables or War and Peace, but he also wanted to cater to the diluted sensibilities, prejudices, and impotent attention spans of late twentieth century American readers. The two conditions are antithetical and so the novel cannot achieve anything greater than becoming a platform for Doctorow's wonderful capacities as a yarn spinner. A very good, if conceptually obnoxious, read."
"I read this in college for a historical fiction class and remember liking it, so I decided to re-read it. This time, I enjoyed it a lot more. The novel revolves around a family in New Rochelle, New York, and their encounters with different characters, both fictional and historically inspired, at the turn of the 20th century. Written in four parts and forty chapters, the novel alternates between characters and tells a moving story about family, justice and love.
The novel is written in a peculiar fashion. The protagonist is an enigmatic figure, whose relationship with the family is tenuous. None of the characters in the family have names, but are instead referred to by their familial role (Mother, Father, Younger Brother). Furthermore, E.L. Doctorow does not use quotation marks to designate dialogue, and instead weaves all spoken word into each paragraph. It gives the book a historical feel, as one could argue that the typical conventions of novelistic dialogue would clash with the historical nature of his novel.
Among the figures who leave their mark on the family's lives are legendary escape artist Harry Houdini, progressive feminist Emma Goldman, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, financial mogul J.P. Morgan, industrial entrepreneur Henry Ford, and several others. I especially enjoyed how Doctorow reduced these monolithic personages to poignant moments and illuminating details, exposing the real substance beneath their public facades.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone with a penchant for historical fiction."
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