. Spinning .

Little in Ragtime has caused me surprise or delight as far as imagery or eloquence, although I would say that Doctorow employs a staccato burst of information sometimes that sets an unmistakable tone of what he wishes to impart.  Often, the lack of adjectives aside from clear-cut relevance is a way of distancing the narrative voice from the drama, thus adding to it by contrast to the event.

But this, this phrase caught and held me:

It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow.  It choked him by its closeness.  And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then find it there after all, behind his ears or in his heart.  (p. 207)

Doctorow slowly brings in historical characters as the story builds, and as I found with Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbitt, establishes their presence and then often brings them back around in some proximity to the lives of the fictional family that is the main story line.  What this does is has the reader looking for details to guess where the paths may cross.

There were a few chapters that focused on J. Pierpont Morgan, giving him background and character depth before we find his fascination with Henry Ford and the Egyptian artifacts as proof of reincarnation. It is interesting, and yet what I feel is the brief encounters with these historical figures doesn’t always get to a particular point that ties in with the main thread of story.

The last chapters returned us to the family home, and recalled a young black woman who the family has taken in after finding her nearly dead newborn in their garden where she tried to bury him.  Doctorow gets into quite a bit of detail about a black man who has tracked down the woman and who continues to visit the family on a weekly basis though the woman refuses to see him. Then he plays ragtime on the piano for the family, the woman agrees to see him, and the two end up married. Here’s where I got a bit frustrated as the woman’s character was never really developed and the whole scenario didn’t seem up to the amount of space given it.

I suppose that even though these two characters were not supposedly based on real people, I should keep them handy as they may pop up again.  The shorts like this do make me wonder…

Doctorow’s emphasis of story appears to be on inequities in society at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he does so subtly by following unrelated characters of different social status as their paths cross. In this manner, we become acquainted with the characters as they are affected by employment, travel, different factions fighting for civil rights, and each other.

The little boy of the first mentioned family is growing up, and we see an interesting side of him:

In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication.  He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one.  The sensation was of being disembodied.  He was no longer anything exact as a person. 

(…) He believed that statues were one way of transforming humans and in some cases horses.  Yet even statues did not remain the same but turned different colors or lost bits and pieces of themselves. 

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.  (p. 135)

This is a fascinating development when set against the established stories of the magician, Harry Houdini, and the elusive Evelyn Nesbitt who so readily transforms herself to suit whatever situation she faces.

I also find it fascinating in raising the question of time and space as the boy goes about his consideration of the world around him:

But the boy’s eyes saw only the tracks made by the skaters, traces quickly erased of moments past, journey’s taken.

This may in fact be another example of narrator reliability, in the mix of fact and fiction:

The motor idled.  Only Jung noticed the little girl in the pinafore standing slightly behind the young woman and holding her hand.  The little girl peeked at Jung and the shaven-headed Jung, who was already disagreeing on certain crucial matters with his beloved mentor, looked through his thick steel-rimmed spectacles at the lovely child and experienced what he realized was a shock of recognition, although at the moment he could not have explained why. (p. 43)

Upon reading this, I am tempted to research the fact of Freud and Jung on this motor trip through New York to prove its accuracy.  Would I find what Doctorow has not given the read: any clue as to why Jung feels this "shock of recognition?"  If, in fact, he did; if in fact this trip to NY was made and if they passed a little girl in a pinafore at all.

See, things like this bother me.  I really must learn to relax and go with the flow. 

Doctorow gives us an America that is extremely class conscious, putting it subtly and yet powerfully in the images he draws:

One evening after the performance Houdini’s manager told him of being called by Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish of 78th Street, who wanted to book Houdini for a private party.  (. . .) Mrs. Fish was throwing a commemorative ball in honor of her friend the late Stanford White, the architect of her home.  He had designed her home in the style of a doge palace.  A doge was the chief magistrate in the republic of Genoa or Venice.  I won’t have nothing to do with those people, Houdini told his manager. (p. 35)

But when the price is doubled, Houdini agrees.  There is much truth in Doctorow’s assessment of the social strata of the era–and yet it is a deeper image of the nature of mankind.  Even as he displays the wealthy as frivolous and uncaring, just by this episode he shows that money is the driving force among the poor as well.  Does it matter what one does to make money? Is compromise different at one level than at another?

Capitalism has its evils, but without it, there would be little accomplishment in the industrial revolution of a country. It appears from this segment of story that there is benefit to all; those with a lot of money spend it, thus filtering it down to the rest of the population, just as capital venture creates employment.