E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, first published in 1975, remains one of the major novels of the twentieth century. It is one of the few novels I have read in a single twenty-four-hour period. If you haven’t read it, the time is now.
The main plot (just one of many interwoven plots) was what happened with a black musician, Coalhouse Walker. He tried to be a responsible citizen, but when an Irish fire brigade in New York trapped him and destroyed his car, and when no justice was forthcoming to make restitution for the car, Walker took the law into his own hands. The event that pushed Coalhouse over the edge was when his fiancée tried to confront the Vice President with the injustice done to Walker, and secret service agents beat her to death. The climax event was when Coalhouse committed a major act of domestic terrorism.
Clearly, every reader understands that Walker’s act of terrorism was completely out of proportion to the wrongs that he suffered. But it is equally clear that he would not have done any of his crimes had he not been goaded into it by the systematic and severe racism that pervaded New York City at that time. The message is clear: people of all races need to be treated with dignity. If they are not, someone might lash out with major acts of destruction. The point is not to assign blame, but to prevent these deadly situations from occurring in the first place.
The parallel situation today is very clear. Minorities in America, including but not limited to blacks, are being treated very badly. Their response, such as destructive riots, has been much greater than the narrowly-defined wrongs done to them. The acts of violence that minorities are committing in America today are often property crimes, but are understandable. When you treat minorities with systematic abuse, their over-reaction is easily predictable. It is as if Doctorow’s novel is being played out today before our eyes; just substitute George Floyd in place of Coalhouse Walker’s fiancée.
What amazes me is the restraint that minorities have shown in response to the abuses against them. If a black terrorist were today to do what the fictional Coalhouse Walker did, it would not be surprising at all; modern black activists have been nicer than one could reasonably expect any group of humans to be under the circumstances.
If minorities were to rise up against the white oppressors, it would be wrong, but us white people (or, in my case, mostly-white) are just asking for it. Minorities must be very nice people to not react as Coalhouse Walker did in the novel.
Doctorow masterfully wove together story lines of many characters, as if he were Tolstoy only much more interesting. I almost felt as if I was reading a history book by James Burke, in which all possible connections were made. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, and Booker T. Washington are just a few of the characters. The characters were, when named, usually real; the fictional characters were identified with names such as Father or Tateh or Mother’s Younger Brother. The one exception is the main character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, who as far as I can tell is invented. Many of the major events were real, for example, when Evelyn Nesbit’s husband shot her former lover on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Of course, Doctorow invented the ways in which the characters came in contact, such as Evelyn Nesbit taking care of the daughter of a poor Jewish artist who later became a major filmmaker. Doctorow probes the what-if of the inner lives of the characters: for example, what if Evelyn Nesbit was really a philanthropist? The situations were real; for example, in the first decade of the twentieth century, there really was a strong socialist movement in America.
The climax scene, a standoff between Coalhouse Walker and Booker T. Washington, was fictitious but perfect. Two very different approaches to solving the problems of race relations stood in conflict with one another: Coalhouse Walker advocating violence, and Booker T. Washington insisting that black people earn the respect of whites. Since Washington’s time, black people have shown themselves the equals of everyone else. However, white racists still refuse to respect them. Washington would have been extremely disappointed to see the continued racism in our society today.
Doctorow used several techniques that most modern writers consider to be forbidden. For example, he would insert intrusive sentences about how the events look to us today, long after the events, introducing a jarring break from the time line of the story. But this didn’t matter to me as I read. Some of the characters, such as Houdini, played roles that were entirely unnecessary for the plot of the novel, and a modern editor would have insisted that Houdini’s story line be removed from the novel. A more serious problem for a modern novelist is that the main character did not enter the novel until chapter 21 on page 178. I would just say that beginning novelists such as myself should not try things that Doctorow got away with. Ragtime is a masterpiece despite things of which, 45 years later, editors and agents disapprove. I enjoyed them, however.
If
you haven’t read Ragtime, now is the
time to do it!
