Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer. But Goldman here is exactly as we expect her to be, and the Booker T. Washington who responds to her statements is precisely as we expect him to be as well. Not so earlier, when Goldman could spot Nesbit in an audience and end up giving her a massage. I suspect, too, that the whole idea of the takeover of the Morgan Library belongs more to the style of than to , though that may not be a crucial objection.
Still, no one has written a book quite like Ragtime , just as no one had written one quite like The Book of Daniel. He creates a world where Houdini could meet the Archduke Ferdinand, where Father from New Rochelle could go to the North Pole with Admiral Peary and lose his marriage in the process, where Evelyn Nesbit could flee to the Lower East Side, where the radical Jewish artist she meets there could become a film maker and meet Mother in Atlantic City and eventually marry her.
He makes one play such tricks, and take the tricks seriously, until one laughs. Ragtime may not be an entirely successful book, but the writer who can do this, and as well as Doctorow has, need set no limits on what he can do next. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest.
Roger Sale is a critic and journalist. Until , he was Professor of English at the University of Washington. His books include Modern Heroism: Essays on D. Lawrence, William Empson and J. Read Next. Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks. Reviewed: Ragtime by E. Near the beginning we learn this about America at the turn of the century: Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. There he is, up at Harvard, delivering the William E. A peasant boy in turn-of-the-century Galicia destroys his family by tattling on his mother to his father.
A schoolteacher in a factory town will be hunted down in her own classroom, behind her autoharp, by the driver of a yellow bus. A curator of pre-Columbian art jogs early one morning right into the middle of a terrorist bombing that dismembers little girls in Catholic school.
Who does he think he is, Joyce Carol Oates? John Cheever also comes to mind, another charmer with skeletons in his liquor cabinet. Should we really be surprised that the best movie ever made from a Doctorow novel stuck the closest to his own script? Neither does the Robert Benton pale facsimile of Billy Bathgate , from a Tom Stoppard script, which the novelist refuses to discuss. Joan: You want to fuck her but if you do you miss the point. The Broadway musical was closer to the novel.
But he is furious. He is furious because somebody has done to his country what Milos Forman did to his novel. Doctorow finds himself in hell:. We are in a pouch of the Eighth Circle, where the thieves reside.
And so intertwined, monster and thief, they begin to melt into one another like hot wax, their two heads joining, their substances merging, until a new third creature is created though somehow redolent of both of them.
And it slowly slithers away into the darkness. I submit that as various as the many genres he explores and exploits, there are even more multiples of the man of letters himself, a skinwalker and a shape-shifter, a John Doc Passos and a Scott Edgerald, a James T.
Farrow and an E. Dash Hammett. He has been, at different times and even simultaneously, a magus, a stormbird, a sherlock, and an Ancient Mariner. But two of his aspects predominate. As much as he is Citizen Doctorow, he is also the Prophet Edgar. Citizen Doctorow is the public intellectual who delivers the lectures and writes the essays that cohere in such books as Reporting the Universe and Jack London. The Prophet Edgar shows up when he wants to or needs to, in essays, stories, novels, and screenplays, heartsick, awestruck, ecstatic, scornful, possessed.
To which add the Yiddish accent of his Bronx boyhood with Tolstoy, jazz, and L. Functioning as chorus are the various friends and neighbors, including the local veterinarian, who attend to this impecunious family during the trials it brings upon itself.
We begin to understand the qualities of the family Bundren—that name, too, somewhat allusive, perhaps suggesting an alliance rather than a family, because for the most part, under the stubborn domination of their cunningly passive father, and given their lives of permanent crisis, the siblings are attentive to one another in the dutiful and not always sympathetic way of kin bound together for the purpose of survival.
This is a family of groundlings tied to the land, subject to the elements, to the seasons, and to natural disasters. Their lives are unmediated by culture, schooling, or money.
It is as if the universe pressing down on them is created by themselves. Faulkner does a number of things in this novel that all together account for its unusual dimensions. And at moments of crisis and impending disaster, what is happening is described incompletely by different characters, so as to create in the reader a state of knowing and not knowing at the same time—a fracturing of the experience that has the uncanny effect of affirming its reality.
Of course Faulkner was not alone in his disdain of exposition. This way of working supposes a compact between writer and reader—that everything will become clear eventually. Time is continuous in this book, which means nothing that happens in the course of events will be incidental. Addie dies and the family loads her coffin in their wagon and sets off for Jefferson. At this point the reader may realize that it is a habit of some family members to see things as something other than what they are.
It is poets who make transformative observations that intensify life. And Faulkner may be saying that Darl requires that diagnosis, or else how can he, Faulkner, get away with verbiage in such contrast with the diction of the common tongue?
Someone who knew the South, as Faulkner did, would not abide that sort of reductionism. Suffering is not seen as a moral endowment, nor is poverty seen as ennobling. The Bundren family relationships are cruel.
Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity. Indeed, so entertaining is Mr.
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