Word: doctorow
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RAGTIME by E.L. DOCTOROW 271 pages. Random House...
...Divided between power and the dream" is the way F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it in his luminous projection of lost innocence, The Great Gatsby. In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow plays a dazzling variation on that theme in a slightly earlier era: the final days of America's privileged childhood...
...novel is carefully framed between 1902 and 1917, surrounding the robust, unambiguous patriotism of Teddy Roosevelt and the complex, brooding morality of Woodrow Wilson. It was Winslow Homer time, when, as Doctorow writes, "a certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard." Eccentrics still putter in their garages and produce inventions without the aid of research-and-development bureaucracies. Henry Ford's new assembly line and Albert Einstein's peculiar idea that the universe is curved crack the dawn of the modern age. Before long, Doctorow notes, painters in Paris will be putting two eyes...
Like ragtime, the jazz form made famous by Scott Joplin, Doctorow's book is a native American fugue, rhythmic, melodic and stately. "It is never right to play ragtime fast," said Joplin, and the same can be said for reading...
...DOCTOROW'S book has a creative weight to match his historical content. He intends his book to be read as if it were being written in front of use we feel we are present at a first, groping recollection of submerged memories, but that is only Doctorow's cunning. In effect, our reading becomes an act of participation; this both dares Doctorow to match his craft against our knowledge of his trickery, and challenges us to delve into ourselves as deeply as does his narrator. Daniel's honesty accuses us: we have shied away from confronting our compromised selves...