![]() Both the infant and his instantly located mother (“She had a child's face, a guileless brown beautiful face. unwashed newborn baby,” miraculously still alive, freshly buried among the flowerbeds of her New Rochelle garden. Mother, a tower of strength and character beneath her period mask of demure and accommodating femininity, likewise discovers an alien race in the form of a “bloody. There, though he proves “not the sturdiest member of the expedition” because of “the tendency of his extremities to freeze easily,” Father-never given any other name in the narrative-has the good fortune to discover Esquimo sex (“They cohabited without even undressing, through vents in their furs, and they went at it with grunts and shouts of fierce joy”), and even manages to sample a bit. Father, whose ample income derives “from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks,” installs his family-wife, son, bachelor brother-in-law, and aging father-in-law-in the “stout manse” he has built in New Rochelle, in 1902, only a few days before joining Peary's third expedition to the Arctic. Is it splitting critical hairs to describe Ragtime as a romance rather than as a novel? Consider the tale it tells, and the language employed in the telling. ![]() ![]() It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the myth of the “bad” America that emerged with such virulent force in the 1960's has found its true laureate in the author of this stylish historical romance. Does this make it sound a little more like 1968 than 1908? That, alas, is very much the point. The villains in Ragtime, drawn with all the subtlety of a William Gropper cartoon, are all representatives of money, the middle class, and white ethnic prejudice. Although the book's complex web of action is wholly confined to the placid atmosphere of turn-of-the-century America-another large element of its appeal, of course-and its story closes on the eve of America's entry into the First World War, heroic roles are exclusively reserved for women, blacks, and partisans of the Left. Ragtime, moreover, has the additional virtue-for there is no question that its audience regards this as a virtue-of endowing some of our more fashionable social pieties with a resonance that is positively mythic. Doctorow is in possession of a genuine literary gift, and readers who have despaired of ever being able to finish some of the more highly touted of recent “serious” novels have every reason to be grateful to a writer who does not spurn the traditional obligation to provide a clear and vivid narrative furnished with colorful characters and a significant theme. 1 This excellent advice is unlikely to be heeded, however. Doctorow's Ragtime, elevating the book to instant commercial success and its author to literary stardom, have already prompted one early celebrant-Raymond Sokolov, writing in the Washington Post-to caution readers against the extravagant claims (his own included) being made on its behalf.
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