Ragtime BOOK REVIEW

Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow

1976 MacMillan London Ltd

This is the kind of books that makes you want to stand up and applaud, even before it is over.

If you can read between the lines, in Ragtime you can see how the industrial revolution is changing the United States and the world after the turn of the twentieth century. The excesses of capitalism, from the extensive exploitation of labourers to the inevitable objectification of women, are wonderfully explained. It explains the onerous struggle of African Americans to civil rights, but also illuminates the era’s ideas about marriage and sex.

Even if reading between the lines isn’t your thing, Ragtime will not disappoint. There is the story of a man who realises that his best years are behind

him. We see his wife, who was born a century too early. And her brother, who’s proof that dreamers have always lived amongst us.

And then there are the people who gave colour to that intriguing era of our history, before WWI would change the world forever. We meet Houdini, Emma Goldman, JP Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Robert Peary, Sigmund Freud, and Henry Ford, and Doctorrow brings them so close that we can almost touch them.

Although the scope of this book is phenomenal, Doctorrow manages to tie all ends together before the book is over. His writing style does take some getting used to – especially since there are no quotation marks – but his prose is fluent and his words perfectly chosen each time and every time.

With Ragtime, Doctorow sets the bar for historical fiction so high that few writers, if any, have been able to match it since.