Spark notes ragtime by el doctorow12/1/2023 ![]() ![]() There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. ![]() There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. For this is a beautifully realized complex of social epiphanies, all watched over by the spirit of Scott Joplin, and as a midsummer selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, bound to make an impact.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Rest assured, nevertheless, that this is a very funny novel-a high achievement in irony that hinges on distancing and if not history's revenge (the last laugh belongs to a deranged parasitic scion.), then the revenge of art. At that time "There were no Negroes.There were no immigrants" and that's the bluntly hammered-out theme that pulls it all together: the vulgarity of the wealthy and their oppression of the lower classes. Morgan, Booker Washington, Zapata and of course-the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This is fleshed out by a succession of wildly imaginative run-ins with (or among) Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Houdini, Henry Ford, J. At the heart of the story is the stultifyingly Victorian model family of a respectable manufacturer of flags, fireworks and patriotic odds and ends whose somewhat Moses-like recovery of an abandoned illegitimate black infant leads to an exemplary tale of racism, insurrection and injustice in America. ![]() Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (1971) mythified the Rosenbergs and their children, but Ragtime galvanizes the headlines and heroes of an entire formative era in a political work of even greater magnitude. After this, the national identity will never be the same. Ragtime is a great billiard game of events, ideas and personages at the turn of the century, where the real protagonist is America herself captured in the last gasps of complacency and social Darwinism-waging territorial wars abroad for God, Country and Mammon, breaking strikes and throwing charity balls at home while WW I hovers in the wings. ![]()
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