![]() A New York newspaper, unable to find a picture of Walker, prints one of Scott Joplin and labels it Walker. It is full of coincidences and implausibilities that is because, like ragtime, it is not about life but about a dream of life.Īfter first blowing up a couple of New Rochelle firehouses, the Coalhouse Gang becomes notorious. Its narrative style is unorthodox consisting entirely of indirect discourse with no dialogue and a point of view that is neither subjective nor omniscient, merely reportorial but then, ragtime music was so unsettling to orthodox listeners that they had to pigeonhole it as whorehouse music. Its hero, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker Jr., is not introduced until about halfway through - hardly within the rules for the "well-made novel." But the device is perfectly within them for well-made ragtime, which is characterized by the serial introduction of entirely new themes. "Ragtime" is basically the story of an upper middle class white family in New Rochelle, New York, and its black servant and her daughter and lover, in the years 1902-1913. ![]() Because it is not a novel about ragtime but a novel in ragtime. Why, then, begin a review of it with a paragraph about ragtime music? Because this is a novel clearly inspired by that music and by the queer light it throws on the time in which it flourished and suffused with its mood and almost its rhythms. "Ragtime" isn't a novel about ragtime music indeed, ragtime music is barely mentioned in passing.
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