This sui generis novel is by E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015). As so often these days, it comes via a reminder from Henry Eliot, who was pointing it out because it was first published in July 1975, ie, 50 years ago.

I'm a month late for its anniversary. But here, better late than never, is my take on this nothing-if-not-unconventional work. It's available on Internet Archive, and that edition has a memorable blurb:



That's what you notice first about the book, I suppose: The juxtaposition of these actual historical characters with the three fictional family groups we're following. The members of the first two are never given names, so you have:

1.
-- Father (prosperous, an amateur explorer, and also a purveyor of flags, bunting, and fireworks, patriotism being "a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s")
-- Mother (a capable manager when he's away, but not entirely happy: "The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences")
-- The Little Boy (their only child)
-- Grandfather
-- Mother's Younger Brother ("a lonely, withdrawn young man... thought to be having difficulty finding himself")

2.
-- Tateh (a poor Jewish immigrant, also a socialist)
-- Mameh (his wife, whose home-based sewing job evolves into sex work for her employer, at which point Tateh rather unkindly kicks her out)
-- The Little Girl (their child)

3.
-- Sarah (a young Black woman who gets pregnant, panics, and abandons her baby in the white family's garden, where he is discovered by Mother, who takes both him and Sarah into the household)
-- Coalhouse Walker Jr (the Black father of the baby, a professional pianist, and the proud owner of a new Model T. Ford; he's well dressed, confident, and unabashed, a combo that Mother and the rest of the white family find disconcerting, even while Mother respects his desire to provide for Sarah and his offspring)
-- Their baby (ultimately orphaned, he continues to find a home with the white family)



Of course, these families' paths cross. Sarah eventually agrees to marry Coalhouse, but before that can happen, he becomes involved in a contretemps with members of the voluntary fire brigade (ie, he rejects their attempts at blatant extortion). The upshot is the gratuitous vandalizing of the Model T.

Legal means of restitution are unsuccessful. Violence ensues. "Later, when the name Coalhouse Walker came to symbolize murder and arson, these earlier attempts to find redress no longer mattered. Even at this date we can't condone the mayhem done in his cause but it is important to know the truth insofar as that is possible. Conversation at the family's dinner table was now obsessive on the subject of this strange proud black man's attempts to have his property restored. It seemed like such a foolish thing to have happened. It seemed to be his fault, somehow, because he was Negro and it was the kind of problem that would only adhere to a Negro. His monumental negritude sat in front of them like a centerpiece on the table."

Sarah decides to take the opportunity of a presidential visit to petition the United States on his behalf. She runs towards the great man, is beaten back by the police, and dies of her injuries. Coalhouse pays for the funeral with the money he'd saved for his wedding. And then his campaign commences in earnest. There's an explosion at a fire station. People die. He's branded a fanatic.

Younger Brother urges Father to testify on Coalhouse's behalf: "You can tell them he's the same Negro maniac whose car is lying at the bottom of Firehouse Pond. You can tell them he's the fellow who visited their own headquarters to make a complaint against Will Conklin and his thugs. You can tell then he's the same crazed black killer who sat by the bedside of someone who died in the hospital of her injuries."

But Coalhouse has already made his demands known. He wants justice served on the fire chief, and he wants his car back, in its original condition. If this doesn't happen, he will continue to kill firemen and burn firehouses: "I will destroy the entire city if need be."

Fear rules the locality. There are false alarms; crowds flock to the churches; militias patrol the streets.

Younger Brother joins the Coalhouse group: I can make bombs, he tells them. And he does indeed help them blow up a firehouse.

There's a brief interlude here where the other connection among the families is formed. In an attempt to get away from press intrusion, Father, Mother, and the whole whanau (except for Younger Brother...) go off to the seaside. Where they meet Tateh and his daughter. Except Tateh is now calling himself Baron Ashkenazy, and he has parlayed his street-painter talents into the world of the movies, where he's doing really well. The two children become friends.


"Ah, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white-curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea. Gulls skimmed the breakers and strutted on the beach..."

Meanwhile, Coalhouse's gang has broken into Pierpont Morgan's library. Negotiate, or we'll destroy the treasures, they say. Long story short: Coalhouse continues to demand the restitution of the Model T. Granted; he takes a (voluntary) hostage to cover the safe departure of his gang (including Younger Brother who heads to Mexico to join the Zapatistas); and he exits into a hail of bullets.

He got the restitution he demanded, but at the price of his life (a scenario presumably inspired by Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas).

Back with the white family we started with, things are unravelling. Mother and Father don't speak much. Grandfather is dead. Then Father dies on the Lusitania, one of 1,200 souls. And Mother marries Tateh: "He said I am not a baron, of course. I am a Jewish socialist from Latvia. Mother accepted him without hesitation. She adored him, she loved to be with him."

Seeing the three disparate children he now has in his life, Tateh has an idea for a movie. By the time he makes it -- and its sequels -- "the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano."

***

That's already quite a story. And much of the text is delivered in short sentences, giving it an urgent, punchy, breathless style. This, for example, where we're following the final stages of Younger Brother's career:

"When Villa did his march south to Torren, two hundred miles along the destroyed tracks of the central railroad, Younger Brother was in the throng. They rode across the great Mexican desert of barrel cactus and Spanish bayonet. They encamped at ranchos and in the coolness of the castellated abbeys smoked 'macuche' wrapped in cornhusks. There was little food. Women with dark shawls carried water jars on their heads."

What I've recounted, however, is only a fraction of the razzamatazz that Doctorow offers us. As that blurb pointed out, actual historical figures stravage through the text, bumping not only into our fictional characters (Harry Houdini's car crashes in front of Father's house, and he's invited in, but feels "trapped by the heavy square furnishings, the drapes and dark rugs, the oriental silk cushions, the green glass lampshades"), but also (fictionally) into each other (Houdini flies stunts to impress a man in a white Daimler, who turns out to be Archduke Franz Ferdinand).

The book excites your curiosity with the little bits of information it scatters like crumbs. I was for ever looking things up...

And truth is often stranger than fiction. You couldn't make up, for example, that extraordinary triangle of Evelyn Nesbit ("the world's first supermodel"), Stanford White (a serial predator), and Harry K. Thaw, wife of Evelyn, killer of Stanford, and a bit of a sadist in his own right.


Evelyn Nesbit

Anarchist Emma Goldman would fill a book all by herself, as would the aforementioned Houdini. And there are just so many more...

We learn about the struggles of migrants, and the struggles of women. We learn about the industrial unrest born of repression and exploitation. (Many of the details are reminiscent of Yonnondio, although that was set three decades later. Poverty balls sound fictional but actually existed, and the way the Bread and Roses strike of 1912 was dealt with reads like the most far-fetched of black fiction.)

We learn about the Peary expedition to the North Pole (which Father briefly joins). We learn about the beginnings of flip books...

And, of course, we're reminded of the music that informs the title. Reading this book, you can't not listen to Maple Leaf Rag, or Wall Street Rag, or Clarinet Marmalade...

The way the novel weaves together the different personages and scenarios, fictional and otherwise, is very clever. It shows you one group from the perspective of another before wheeling back to bring them into focus; it offers you a little cameo, only later providing its background. It's like a mosaic, in that each little piece is understandable only in the context of the whole. For example, we're at the docks, watching the treasures roll in from Europe, and it's only later that we realize they're heading for the J.P. Morgan Library.


Emma Goldman

***

So, I suppose the big question is: What kind of historical novel is it that so freely and flamboyantly mixes the factual and the fictional?

Jonathan Dee certainly wants to ask that question. On that Houdini car crash incident, he remarks: "One’s immediate reaction, as a fellow novelist, at least, is: Oh, come on, you can’t get away with that. You can’t possibly set your whole plot in motion via the most brazenly unlikely, nakedly manufactured coincidence you can think of and then expect the reader to trust anything else you say. But of course Doctorow does get away with it and much more; the quiet, soothing authority of his style coolly belies the audacity of nearly everything Ragtime is trying to do. As a writer, he had more than a little Houdini in him."

When the novel appeared, though, some dubbed the fact/fiction blend "immoral". Even John Updike baulks a bit at a plot where "the historical figures do things and achieve conjunctions that never transpired". In a memorable bit of phrasing, he notes, queasily: "It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game."

The first and most obvious answer to the what-kind-of-novel-is-this question is that it's a comic novel. Dee again: "Ragtime... lets us know right away that the comic warp of its narrative will leave no lifelike loose end. It has the gleefully lunatic recursiveness of a Seinfeld episode... Nothing is too unlikely to delight; any and all synchronicities will be permitted in the service of authorial fantasy."

A subtly political novel might be the next answer: "That inaugural unlikelihood [of Houdini and the car] opens a kind of floodgate in the novel whereby the gaps between wildly disparate American lives are closed and the veils that keep some invisible to others are dropped."

In the very first paragraph, we're told: "There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." The rest of the book goes on to shout back, pantomime-like: Oh, yes, there were... Writing in 2022, Dee suggests: "While today this tale of a Black man’s struggle to affirm what should not need affirming -- the fact of his humanity -- might not be considered Doctorow’s to tell, the story itself has, sadly, lost none of its contemporaneity. Set in the first decades of the twentieth century, written in 1975, so much of it seems like it could have happened yesterday."

X
The Eternal Question, by Charles Dana Gibson. Mother's Younger Brother has this drawing -- which represents Evelyn -- on his wall

I guess the next answer to that category question is that Ragtime is a postmodern novel. After all, it was postmodernism that taught us to be sceptical of any attempt to draw a firm line between "history" and "narrative", pointing out that both are the product of an editorial process that selects, and omits, and emphasizes to suit its own purposes.

Derek Wright: "As Doctorow, following Roland Barthes, has said in interview statements, there is no fiction or non-fiction, only narrative: the telling of a story... [Doctorow's] entire quasi-history is itself systematically unsynchronized or 'in ragged time' with the school textbook, its facts always slightly askew from the received version."

Wright goes on, however, to point out some of the clues that distinguish the historical and the fictional material (insofar as such an endeavour is possible...). The vignettes of Morgan, Ford, and Houdini, for example, "have a tendency to immobilize the narrative by the sheer mass of detailed information, to clutter it with blocks of fact, most notably in long accounts of the objects and properties the characters own. This draws attention obtrusively to the amount of undiluted factuality that has not been fictionalized". The forward momentum of the novel likewise derives solely from the fictional components. What we call history, if left to itself, is by implication just "a sprawling chaotic mass of unconnected facts".

Michael Chabon, however, has a nice way of encapsulating the way Ragtime takes us beyond both "the airless box of so-called 'dirty realism' and the blank, mirrored expanse of so-called postmodernism": "Done properly, the incorporation of historical figures into a fictional context did not come off as some kind of smart-ass critique of subjectivity and the fictive nature of history. Done properly it just made the lies you were telling your reader -- with his or her full and willing consent, of course -- sound that much more true. And that small-t truth then became a powerful tool for getting across whatever Truth, subjective and fragmentary though it might be, that you felt you had it in you to express."


E.L. Doctorow

***

All in all, this was a zany, wacky, utterly OTT read, unlike anything else I've ever experienced.

It's also worth noting Doctorow's advice on writing. He accomplishes nothing in under six or eight drafts; usually, then, a book takes a few years to complete.

Nor does he know, at the initial stages, how any given project is going to end: "It's not a terribly rational way to work. It's hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it's like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

And he was happy if he produced 600 words a day...