One hostess invitedĮveryone to a stockyard ball. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s Doctorow’s version of the early 20th-century poverty-ball phenomenon: “Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Morgan and a Henryįord get together in a mansion on New York’s West 36th Street, exchange their respective thoughts on reincarnation and “found the most secret and exclusive club in America, The Pyramid, of which they were the only members.” He congratulated him on the invention of the airplane.” Or of the scene in which a J. Who “gazed.with stupid heavy-lidded eyes” and “didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. Of the passages in which one Harry Houdini, grown dissatisfied with being “a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician,” sails to Europe, learns to fly a biplane and performs a few turns before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, And the reviewer is tempted to dispense with heavy breathing and analysis and settle down to mindless celebration of the pure fun of the thing. It works so well that one devours it in a single sitting as if it were the most conventional of entertainments.
But the first thing to be said about itĭocumentary-half invented-seem truer than the truth? Doctorow’s “Ragtime” is a highly original experiment in historical fiction. Book Review: 'Ragtime' By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT.
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