Ragtime
Mathews, Judy
Book Review/Judy Mathews From Ragtime to Riches • m.•^=^•••^••^. The setting is New York City during the early 1900s—a place and time with which most of us are either directly or indirectly...
...It begins when Harry Houdini's car breaks down in front of the home of the well-to-do family around whom the novel centers, the family which later befriends Sarah and Coalhouse: Father, who spends the first half of the book accompanying Admiral Peary to the North Pole, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, and The Little Boy, who stares in awe at Houdini's shiny headlights...
...But as an authentic rendering of the American experience and of the American people, it is...well, it is jazz...
...Finally he and 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 some revolutionaries who have joined him invade J.P...
...Doctorow admonishes the reader in the words of Scott Joplin: "Do not play this piece fast...
...It eventually is restored, his accomplices are released, and Coalhouse walks out onto 36th Street where he is gunned down by a firing squad of policemen...
...The image was of a small boy looking at himself in the shiny brass headlamp of an automobile...
...Book Review/Judy Mathews From Ragtime to Riches • m...
...Up yours, Jack, the magician relied...
...Hecould hear the oohs and aahs rising from the street as he made the cable jerk and spin...
...Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful sex goddess whose sadistic husband has recently murdered her lover (the famous architect, Stanford White), befriends Tateh and his daughter and later has an affair with Mother's Younger Brother...
...It is not until Chapter 21 that we even hear of Coalhouse Walker, whose story comprises much of the remainder of the novel...
...The author introduces as well the socialist immigrant Tateh (Yiddish for Dad) and his beautiful daughter who are submerged in a Lower East Side slum...
...One week later he bombs another firehouse, setting off a state of panic in New York...
...Hey, Houdini, the man said, f*** ou...
...The setting is New York City during the early 1900s—a place and time with which most of us are either directly or indirectly acquainted...
...He appeared to struggle...
...Doctorow Random House $8 . 95 Sarah, the unwed mother of his child, thus winning the friendship of the family with which Sarah lives...
...Morgan's library and wire it to detonate if his automobile is not restored...
...He aced the windows of the Times Tower, hen the open spaces over Broadway and ;eventh Avenue...
...When police and firemen refuse to cooperate, Coalhouse seeks revenge, but not before Sarah tries to help...
...He felt himself revolving...
...Ritualistically liberal...
...Hoping to solicit the aid of the vice-presidential candidate, James Sherman, she naively goes to a political speech where she is clubbed in the chest by a bodyguard as she raises her black hand in the crowd...
...The book has come full circle...
...He could actually release himself -om a strait jacket in less than a minute...
...Coalhouse then blows up the firehouse where he had been detained, killing four people and demanding again that his automobile be restored...
...The entire first half of the novel focuses on minor characters—some fictional, some factual, and some who may be either...
...Doctorow is dealing with a relatively recent past, he must pay precise attention to the minutest detail if he wishes, as he does, to convince his readers that the plot could have taken place, and perhaps even did...
...She dies a few days later of pneumonia...
...One has the impression that Doctorow spent a far greater time conceiving a style and a method than he did in creating a plot...
...It was at this moment that an image composed itself in Houdini's mind...
...Inside the thick duck of the strait jacket there was no light...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 33...
...It is never right to play Ragtime fast...
...A man was grinning at him, pside down, from a twelfth-floor win-ow...
...The author of Ragtime is, however, undaunted by his audience's awareness, and indeed takes advantage of it in order to weave a rather ordinary plot around historical people—Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, J .P...
...So he took finger...
...Articulate, well-dressed, and driving a snazzy Model T Ford, he courts and proposes marriage to Ragtime by E.L...
...Doctorow attacks not only racial bigotry, but the entire capitalistic system, male chauvinism, Tammany Hall politics, police brutality, and xenophobia...
...Contrived...
...And because in his latest novel E.L...
...We see Houdini again...
...One day, after leaving Sarah in the upper-middle-class suburb of New Rochelle, Coalhouse is halted by a group of red-necked volunteer firemen who insist he pay $25 or present a pass in order to drive on the street...
...The wind turned Houdini toward he building...
...he is wearing a strait jacket and -ianging by his ankles from the Times rower in Times Square: "The breeze up here was somewhat ,tronger...
...When he refuses, the firemen vandalize his Model T, defecate in its back seat, and push the automobile into a pond...
...In tempo and in syncopated rhythm, then, Ragtime is as authentic as Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag...
...He rested for a moment...
...ut if he did it too quickly people would of believe he was legitimate...
...Hey, Houdini, a voice ailed...
...Just aswith ragtime music, the novel begins slowly on an unaccented beat with vignettes of the minor characters and continues through the major plot, ending again on a subdued note...
...He was upside down over Broadway, the year was 1914, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was reported to have been assassinated...
...Soon his entire upper half, including his head, was entangled in the restraint...
...One characteristic of ragtime music is its syncopated rhythm, which begins on an unaccented beat and continues through the next accented beat, or which begins on the last half of a beat and continues through the first half of the following beat...
...Morgan, Henry Ford, and Admiral Peary, for example—in a fascinatingly innovative style...
...Emma Goldman speaks articulately and intelligently for socialism and the emancipation of women...
...But simplistic as the plot and ideology may be, this is a novel of polished technique...
...Incensed, Coalhouse demands total restoration of the car...
...The final chapter is then a summary of what has happened to the minor :haracters in the interim...
...Doctorow's novel follows this pattern...
...Both Evelyn and Mother's Younger Brother encounter Emma Goldman and are briefly radicalized...
...Coalhouse Walker, a Negro ragtime musician, is the hero (or rather, the antihero) of the novel...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
