Ragtime

Doctorow's collage method — Houdini bantering with Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan lecturing Ford on reincarnation, Emma Goldman massaging Evelyn Nesbit — isn't novelty for its own sake; it's a demonstration that history and fiction are made of the same material, personal invention laid over a documentary record that was always selective about whose stories it preserved. The nameless family at the book's center, identified only as Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, stands for a comfortable white American narrative that the novel deliberately treats as replaceable and unindividuated, while Coalhouse Walker Jr., the ragtime pianist whose fight for basic justice becomes the novel's spine, is given a full name, a fully realized interior life, and a tragedy the invented white family never has to earn.

Ragtime music itself, syncopated and improvisatory, models the novel's structure: short scenes interrupt and overlay each other the way a ragtime melody displaces its beat against a steady bass line, and the era's obsession with mechanical reproduction — Ford's assembly line, Houdini's escapes, early film — becomes a metaphor for a country remaking itself, and its people, into interchangeable, marketable units. Tateh's rise from Jewish immigrant peddler to movie mogul, reinventing himself under a new name, tracks the American mythology of self-invention that the novel simultaneously admires and undercuts by showing exactly whom that mythology excludes.

Doctorow's most audacious device is giving documented people counterfactual private moments — Morgan's obsession with Egyptian mysticism, Freud and Jung sharing a nauseated boat ride through Coney Island's tunnel of love — none of which happened, all of which are plausible enough within each figure's known public persona to feel like they might have. The technique drew charges of irresponsibility from some historians and delight from most critics, but its real function is to argue that the official record and invented fiction are equally constructed narratives, and that the novel's job is to notice which people history bothered to individualize and which — like Coalhouse, like the immigrant multitudes Tateh emerges from — it flattened into background.