BOOKS:

...And few more severe indictments of the "great businessman" figure in our history have been created...

...Again and again he tells me there is no theological basis for arguing that genital abstinence is intrinsically more Christian than genital intercourse...

...Written in a culture it knows to be "imperialistic" and hostile, The Sexual Celibate takes a vital first step in sketching a blueprint for the restoration of a tradition that says there is more to life than genital union, wonderful as that experience may be...

...Perhaps our fiction, like our lives, suffers from an excess of the individual...

...In a novel in which surface counts for so much, the reader suspects that there is something vital underneath...

...What Doctorow manages to do, how...

...homosexual feelings in celibates, as in all people, are not to be denied but felt-only then can they be dealt with realistically...

...Sexual" means that one is male or female (and, to some extent, a mixture of the two), that he or she is homosexual or heterosexual (often, a blend of both), that he or she is capable of affection and procreation, that he or she seeks interpersonal love...

...As for all that money, it's nice to see one of the truly talented writers winning for a change...

...Dos Passos used history...

...Honey and milk are under your tongue...

...This kind of thing is rather puzzling, even in the literary world...

...But this reader, at least, did not get beyond that...

...My hope is that this book will contribute something simply by opening up intelligent discussion...

...The lives of the common and the uncommon are stitched together...

...But Goergen did distill a good deal of theology and psychology, he did retain his common sense, and not once did he back off from taking a position...

...This is perhaps the last American nation to believe in itself absolutely, its sense of mission combined with an innocent virtue...

...But why, I ask, is it necessary to write this book, to make all these distinctions, to dole out all this advice...

...Bereft of a rationale for celibacy (it was carried away in the turbulence of the 1960s), priests and religious-in what numbers I do not know-experiment with the full gamut of sexual and genital behavior, some of them feeling a self-hate from incorporating in toto the sexual values of the "liberated" culture...

...In Dos Passos's great trilogy, the biographical is used as a counterweight to the fictional...

...Ragtime is not a "masterpiece" but it is a brilliantly written novel, one that manages to be thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly serious...

...It is doing quite well in hardcover, which may indicate that the serious reading public in this country really is growing...

...When "sexual" and "celibate" are juxtaposed in a title and intertwined in a theme, we are at least on the way to an answer that is both humane and religious.r that is both humane and religious...

...The question of whether or not Ragtime is worth the sum Bantam is reputed to have paid for it can only be answered by how large an audience the paperback version captures...

...He discovers a joyous humor which makes the novel difficult to put down...

...ever, is even more intriguing...

...One who is not celibate can draw from Goergen's summary of Judaeo-Christian attitudes toward sexuality...

...It is only a first step: I found the style of the book to be choppy, awkward, disjointed...

...But perhaps there isn't...

...So many of our eggs are in the basket of genital orgasm that someone who takes the radical (and threatening) position that their life is celibate and human, sexually human, is often dismissed as pathological...

...Moral he or she may be ("prudish" would be better), but hardly "normal" or "adjusted" or "fulfilled...

...In Ragtime, the reader discovers Doc-torow's language, sharp, rhythmic, vitally energetic...

...Your lips, my promised one, distill wild honey...

...The advice is direct, down to earth, informed by the insights of modern psychology...

...Logically, this is the kind of novel that should focus on the lives of its fictional characters, interrupting the narration only as Dos Pas-sos did in the biographical sections of USA...

...His position is actually at odds with Scripture: Paul was cautious though positive about sex...

...The erotic is celebrated in a relationship that is strong, ongoing, exclusive, and faithful...

...What matters, rather (and I must agree), is the extent to which each contributes to the humanization and spiritualization of man...

...It lacks depth, in much the same way as the music from which it derives its title lacks depth...

...Only in such a time could Doctorow have woven the lives of his main characters, cast into the world as Mother and Father and Tateh and Mameh and Coalhouse Walker Jr., into the lives of those who are crucial to our history, who are named Henry Ford and Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan and Emma Goldman...

...so the most direct statements we have are found in the Old Testament writings of the Yahwist, who viewed the basic elements of sexuality as fellowship and goodness, and the author of the Song of Songs, who celebrated sexual pleasure quite apart from its role in procreation...

...The religious celibate, in Goergen's view, ought to be sexual (ought misses the point: he or she simply is) but ought not to be genital...

...In Doctorow, the stuff of J. P. Morgan is, indeed, the stuff of fictional life...

...But at no time did I feel that either the suffering or the joy were individualized...

...The scene in which Mother's Younger Brother hides in the closet while Emma Goldman massages the murdered Stanford White's ex-mistress, Evelyn Nesbit, is a magnificent example of what Doctorow is capable of...

...Jesus simply did not concern himself with it...

...His attempt is important both to Roman Catholicism and to the pluralistic culture in which it is embedded...

...masturbation is neither unhealthy nor immoral for the celibate, but it is something he ultimately wishes to grow beyond...

...But if this is the great success of Ragtime, it is also the book's chief weakness...

...He is, rather, one of the best novelists writing in America today...

...For those who have come to feel that contemporary American fiction has created a strait jacket out of individuality, Ragtime is bound to be exciting reading...

...Augustine seems to have been the culprit in the West...

...Not the Middle Ages, not even the American Revolution-no, what Doctorow has chosen is America at the turn of the century, the east of the west he gave us in Welcome to Hard Times...

...Does celibacy belong in a tradition whose roots are so enthusiastic about genital pleasure...

...And for this time, at least, the critics seem to have called the tune for the public...

...I found its effect fiat...

...The characters live and die as part of the history that embodies them...

...Genital" is a specific dimension of "sexual," referring to the interpersonal stimulation of sexual organs leading to orgasm...

...The key to Goergen's affirmation- and celebration-of sexuality in the celibate lies in his distinction between "sexual" and "genital...

...I review this book as an outsider to the celibate community, one to whom Goergen is painstakingly fair...

...Doctorow, after all, is no Jacqueline Susann nor is Ragtime a manufactured best-seller like Jaws...

...AC/DC, gay, swinging may now be beautiful, but our tolerance somehow leaves off at the rectory or convent door...

...No one, certainly, can accuse Doctorow of dehumanizing his characters...

...and the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon...

...What is the struggle of which Goergen speaks...

...From the very first sentence-''In 1902 Father built a house at the crest 6f the Broadview Avenue Hill in New Rochelle, New York"-to the ex-socialist Tateh's culminating vision of his daughter, his adopted son, and his black ward playing together in California, a scene in which the vision embodied in socialism is replaced by the vision of an Our Gang film, Doctorow manipulates history to serve the demands of the personal...

...If anything, he is to be praised for the deft artistry with which he brings to life those whose claim is that they were larger than life...

...Unlike the historical novelist, however, he does not deal with a past that time has already mythicized...

...In others, such as J. P. Morgan, the character embodies what the man has come to represent in history-the ra-paciousness of a capitalism which knows no bounds, the self-aggrandizing mysticism that cloaks power at its most primitive...

...In Ragtime, there is suffering made history and there is joy made history...

...The Sexual Celibate DONALD GOERGEN Seabury, $8.95 JOHN N. KOTRE Donald Goergen is an earnest, candid (in this book, almost naked) young man, a religious celibate writing for other religious celibates coming to grips with the meaning of their commitment...

...The trouble is that "liberated" secular culture is really not that liberated, that free of prejudice...

...It is quite possible that this was part of Doctorow's strategy in writing the novel...

...In certain cases, most notably with Houdini and Emma Goldman, what emerges is more human, more fundamental, than what a biographer could capture...

...Ragtime may point toward a new direction for the American novel...

...As an outsider, I merely note his practical advice to celibates: prospective candidates need not experience genital union in order to make their ensuing commitment meaningful (more than likely they will be exploiting a partner to gain the desired experience...

...I surmise that it results from the confluence of "liberated" secular culture with the tradition of celibacy in Roman Catholicism-a blend which, as matters stand now, has left that ancient tradition in a confused, downcast, introspective swirl...

...As I write this, the book is number one on the best-seller list and has been on that list for seven weeks...

...Influenced by Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, he is the one who introduced into Christian thought the notion that physical pleasure is the enemy of man...

...Easier to close the door and project all kinds of emotional aberrations and mental rigidities onto the blank surface in front of us...

...And his success is particularly notable...

...But they do not live in the fiction...

...When Coalhouse is murdered by the New York police, the reaction of the reader is neutralized by that brilliant surface...

...celibates are to be intimate with others, and intimacy requires touch, but touch ought not to lead to genital stimulation...

...Both The Book of Daniel and Welcome to Hard Times make connections between past and present-the one in terms of how political legacies dominate the present that must be lived through, the other in terms of how violence and hope are linked in this country...

...Few scenes by a contemporary novelist match the perverse humor with which Doctorow brings together J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in Ragtime...

...The novel is dominated by its surface...

...It is vibrant, it is exciting, and it is about America our grandfather...

...It is a period which he obviously sees as the crucible of our own America, and yet he takes the reader into a country as different from ours as day is from night...

...It is not easy to write, nor present to the public, a book which contains many of my own personal experiences, spiritual struggles, and theological convictions...

...What Doctorow attempts in Ragtime is to re-create history through the novel...

...Most of the conversations I have heard about the novel inevitably come down to rumors about the sum Doctorow will ultimately receive for the paperback rights...

...None of these people-not Mother, not Father, not Younger Brother, not Tateh, not even the Negro Musician, Coalhouse Walker, whose desire to avenge himself upon the white world springs from his incredibly moral sense of having been wronged-succeeds in arousing one's sympathy...

...And it brings to wider public attention a novelist who has already written two first-rate books, Welcome to Hard Times (which Random House has reissued along with Ragtime) and The Book of Daniel, which is both Doc-torow's best novel and the finest political novel written by an American during the much-politicized Sixties...

...BOOKS THE STUFF OF FICTIONAL HISTORY LEONARD KRIEGEL Ragtime E. L. DOCTOROW Random House, $8.95 Ragtime is one of those novels which demand a discussion of the relationship of money and art...

...Doctorow naturalizes it...

...What is perhaps even more noteworthy is that Ragtime has received stunning reviews everywhere from The Village Voice to Women's Wear Daily...