Ragtime — E. L. Doctrow

It starts out so odd­ly. It’s off putting. There is a fam­i­ly whose mem­bers have no names only mark­ers for their places Mother, Father, Younger Brother, the Boy. Then Houdini crash­es his car into a tree and ends up sweat­ing out an after­noon in the fam­i­ly par­lor and that seems so unpromis­ing. And yet. Stick with it. That’s my advice.

Houdini is only the first of the his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters who will show up and the sto­ry will shift sev­er­al times to high­light them and oth­er (named) fic­tion­al char­ac­ters. There is the impov­er­ished immi­grant Tateh with his beau­ti­ful daugh­ter whose brief inter­ac­tions with the socialite Eveyln Nesbit and the rad­i­cal Emma Goldman send him run­ning from his immi­grant life into anoth­er alto­geth­er self-made American one. And Coalhouse Walker III, the black man who’s humil­i­a­tion at the hands of a racist fire chief and his men pro­vides the impe­tus for an ongo­ing bat­tle for dig­ni­ty and redress that ends with a dyna­mite rigged art col­lec­tion of JP Morgan and a show­down in the streets of New York.

Both of these sto­ries along with the sto­ry of our unmanned fam­i­ly bump into one anoth­er again and again. There are so many cross­ing sto­ries that you can’t make a tidy sum­ma­ry of all the plot points. There are also a lot of char­ac­ters, but Doctorow is a good enough writer that you don’t end up half way through the sto­ry going “and just who is Sarah?” You can fol­low each of the char­ac­ters through the sto­ry and come away with an under­stand­ing of their dif­fer­ing views of the world the they share.

Doctorow is a love­ly writer, his sen­tences sing along with the Ragtime music that CWIII plays on the fam­i­ly piano as he courts the silent girl Sarah. This book is an ear­ly exper­i­ment in mix­ing his­tor­i­cal and fic­tion­al char­ac­ters out­side of the genre of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. There are a few unac­count­ably sur­re­al moments. Freud and Jung in the tun­nel of love on Coney Island stands out as one of them. But most of it is just odd enough to keep your atten­tion focused where the writer wants it to be.

(pub­lished 1975)

Once you fall into the rag­time tem­po it rocks along. 

Knick-Knack

This old man — he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb.

This old man, my old man, my man, is a long haul truck­er. Here last week, gone this week. Back the week after.

Knick-knack, paddy-whack give a dog a bone. 

I’m singing to the big old hound lying on the kitchen lino. Useless thing. All sag­gy skin and knob­bly joints any­more. Snufflin’ in his sleep after rab­bits he’s nev­er caught. My old man sings that Elvis song to him. Says it’s because Booger is my dog, ain’t no friend of his. Which is why Booger sleeps on his side of the bed when he’s home? I don’t think so. Continue read­ing “Knick-Knack”