'Ragtime' by E L Doctorow

This was a revelation. It is a book and an author I had vaguely heard about but knew nothing much about. It was published in the UK fifty years ago in January 1976, the same month that it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the USA where it had been published the previous year.

It is just tremendous.

Where to start? The author was Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (1931 - 2015). He was born ninety years ago this month in the Bronx, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants. He did military service during the Korean War and in West Germany, going on to become a film script reader, book editor and university teacher. His private life was quiet and unadventurous, spent mostly living in New York City and its environs. He wrote eleven novels as well as collections of essays and short stories, winning dozens of awards. 'Ragtime' was his third novel and is his most celebrated.

It is essentially a work of historical fiction, but while being deadly serious in its message, it is playful and enormous fun to read. What he was apparently trying to do here was to provide an impressionistic portrait of a place, a people and an age - a bunch of characters living on the north-eastern American seaboard (mainly New York) in the first years of the twentieth century before World War One when ragtime music was fresh, fashionable and exciting.

The book's title is not only a reference to a period of time, but in its style seems to be trying to echo this musical style too with its combination of steady structured march-like piano playing with the left hand and wilder more experimental playing with the right. There is a conventional fictional narrative here involving invented characters and a reasonably straight forward plot, but their stories are mixed up with those of real historical characters of the time - famous and infamous - whose presence gives the book, originality spice and flavour.

It is very well-researched, but is most definitely fiction and not history. A lot of the activities, ideas and conversations of the 'real' historical figures are imagined, and in the case of some - J P Morgan in particular - a touch unfair. But Doctorow writes so well that he gets away with these liberties, while also brilliantly summing up in short paragraphs made up of short sentences the ways that these archetypal Americans of the ragtime era are remembered. Quite simply he brings them alive - Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit also play significant roles in the plot, as does the real murder of the architect Stanford White by Nesbit's husband Harry Thaw in 1906. The main narrative is thus interrupted occasionally with a short John Aubreyesque passage, like this little gem about the car manufacturer Henry Ford:

At Highland park, Michigan, the first Model T automobile built on a moving assembly line lurched down a ramp and came to rest in the grass under a clear sky. It was black and ungainly and stood high off the ground. Its inventor regarded it from a distance. His derby was tilted back on his head. He chewed on a piece of straw. In his left hand he held a pocket watch. The employer of many men, a good number of them foreign-born, he had long believed that most human beings were too dumb to make a good living. He’d conceived the idea of breaking down the work operations in the assembly of and automobile to their simples steps, so that any fool could perform them. Instead of having one man learn the hundreds of tasks in the building of one motorcar, walking him hither and yon to pick out the parts from a general inventory, why not stand him in his place, have him do just one task over and over, and let the parts come past him on moving belts. Thus the worker’s mental capacity would not be taxed. The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut, the inventor said to his associates. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. He had a way with words. He had gotten his inspiration from a visit to a beef-packing concern where the cows were swung through the plant in slings from overhead cables. With his tongue he moved the straw from one corner of his mouth to the other. He looked at his watch again. Part of his genius consisted in seeming to his executives and competitors not as quick-witted as they. He brushed the grass with the tip of his shoe. Exactly six minutes after the car had rolled down the ramp an identical car appeared at the top of the ramp, stood for a moment, pointed at the cold early morning sun, then rolled down and crashed into the rear of the first one. Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson. He had caused a machine to replicate itself endlessly. His executives and managers and assistants crowded round him to shake his hand. Tears were in their eyes. He allotted sixty seconds on his pocket watch for a display of sentiment. Then he sent everyone back to work. He knew there were refinements to be made and he was right. By controlling the speed of the moving belts he could control the workers’ rate of production. He did not want a worker to stoop over or to take more than one step from his work site. The worker must have every second necessary for his job but not a singe unnecessary second. From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture – not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts. Soon he was producing three thousand cars a month and selling them to the multitudes. He was to live a long and active life.

At its heart, though, Ragtime is a big, serious novel about the major ways in which America was changing in the early twentieth century. Racism of course is very prominent, as is immigration from Eastern Europe. The central characters (some named, others unnamed) represent different strands of thinking about these matters, each set of positions and experiences being fully and fairly explored. Towards the end of the novel a thriller-type situation is created involving the closest we get to a hero in 'Ragtime' - a highly principled black pianist called Coalface Walker. This brings the tensions to a head and provides as much satisfying narrative resolution as is possible in a book of this kind.

Overall, a singularly impressive novel.