![]() Three of his named real-life characters – and I’ve only just realised that only his real-life characters have names – are involved in a sensational love triangle. So Father is appalled when he sees ‘Esquimos’ copulating, less for the unashamed openness of it, which is only to be expected from a race whose behaviour always shows them to be no better than children, but for the pleasure the woman clearly experiences as she thrusts her pelvis towards the man.īut this being an E L Doctorow novel, nothing is ever that simple. Our author, making use of nearly 70 years of hindsight, is able to hold up their behaviour for our examination as though this is some strange species rather than our human great-grandparents. Tateh has brought his undisputable Jewish codes with him, but then Mother and Father are bound by codes of their own that bring them neither happiness nor insight. That’s probably because sex is one of Doctorow’s favourite issues – and, in particular, the weirdness of sexual mores in a world where the past really does seem to be a different country, and not only in the ethnically ghettoised poorer districts of the city. I suddenly seem to be concentrating on sex. The instant he finds out that Mameh could only get a piecework rate they could live on by letting the boss screw her – these are the realities as Doctorow presents them – his Old World moral code dictates what he has to do. Father and Mother get on fine – except sex for her is no more than a duty and it’s ok for him to disappear for months on an Arctic expedition that is no more than a vanity project for Robert Peary. All their lives are unsatisfactory – in entirely different ways, of course, but always because early 20th Century New York hasn’t yet figured out a way for any of its diverse populations to live. The other family are dirt-poor Tateh, Mameh and The Little Girl. So what do you want to know? One of the fictional families whose lives we follow consists of middle class Father, Mother (and her Younger Brother) and the little boy. ![]() I’m not going to be able to do justice to the complexities either of the intertwining plots or the intertwining sexual and political themes. ![]() And that’s only a tiny selection of the locations and points of view Doctorow takes us to in these first 80-odd pages. You’re in the Lower East Side, you’re on Ellis Island as unsympathetic immigration officers weigh up whether you should be sent back on the next ship to Europe, you’re in a cell with Harry Houdini, you’re with Freud searching in vain for a public lavatory. It feels like time travel, but the way Doctorow handles the leap back into New York in the 1900s makes it feel as though your feet never, ever touch the ground. That happens in other novels, but not in the headlong, immersive way of Ragtime. I read it once before, decades ago, and all I remember about it is that the lives of real people in the early years of the 20th Century intertwine with those of fictional characters.
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