Word: doctorow
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...figures become part of fictional events and fictional characters participate in real history. In ways both fantastic and poetically convincing, the members of a suburban upper-middle-class family combine and change in the undertow of events. As if Clarence Day had written Future Shock into Life with Father, Doctorow's images and improvisations foreshadow the 20th century's coming preoccupation with scandal, psychoanalysis, solipsism, race, technological power and megalomania...
Harry Thaw empties his pistol into the face of Architect Stanford White, the lover of Thaw's showgirl wife Evelyn Nesbit. White goes to his grave and Thaw to an insane asylum. But Doctorow has his own plans for Evelyn. Down from her red velvet swing, she drifts to the immigrant slums of New York's Lower East Side, where her social consciousness is raised by anarchist Emma Goldman. Sigmund Freud confronts the pleasure principle at Coney Island and cannot get back to Vienna fast enough...
...black musician turns violent revolutionary after his new Model T is vandalized by jealous whites. Harry Houdini, the immortal escape artist, cannot slip from his mother's apron strings. He is also a man incapable of political thought because, in Doctorow's moving phrase, "he could not reason from his own hurt feelings...
Literal descriptions and interpretations make many novels sound better than they are. With Ragtime, just the opposite is true. Its lyric tone, fluid structure and vigorous rhythms give it a musical quality that explanation mutes. In Doctorow's hands, the nation's secular fall from grace is no catalogue of sin. no mere tour de force; the novelist has managed to seize the strands of actuality and transform them into a fabulous tale...
...long after he got out of the Army in 1954, E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow sat down on a wooden crate in front of his typewriter and told his wife Helen, "This is the way we are going to survive." He had $135 to his name. Forty-eight hours later, he had $50 left and a lot of blank paper...