Author: E. L. Doctorow
Length: 320 pages
Ragtime
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AVAILABLE!
AVAILABLE!
Description
“The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.”
Janet Dore –
Even though I’ll die trying, I’m determined to try to read as many of the 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die—Ragtime made the list.
It’s set in the early 1900’s in New York (New Rochelle and New York City), between 1902 to 1912 to be exact. The central theme is racism and the story is about how one upstanding black man handles an egregious incident directed at him.
Let’s get the oddities out of the way…
It’s unclear who the narrator is as he is not of the time and place of the story. After poking around Google a bit, I’ve concluded it was likely Doctorow himself. This keeps you a bit emotionally disconnected from the story as you are simply an observer. In fact, the story reads a lot like a non-fiction book.
Doctorow was not a big believer in paragraphs, not even for dialogue, nor were there any quotation marks.
The underlying story was riveting and timeless, and could easily be set in the same place and happen today—one sign of a true classic. It left me feeling both heartened by how far we’ve come with the issue of racism and saddened by how stuck we are. Ragtime should definitely be on your #BLACKLIVESMATTER reading list.
You’ll spend time getting to know real life characters, including Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Houdini and JP Morgan. What a fun way to learn about this fascinating time in history!
Unlike many classics, I didn’t find it dry or boring. I immediately watched the movie (again) to get a better sense of the characters. Although, for obvious reasons, it didn’t delve as deeply into the historic details as the book, it was very well done and, I believe, stayed pretty true Doctorow’s vision.