We've encountered a lot of different storylines in Ragtime so far, but all of these storylines intertwine to an extent that I don't think I've ever seen in a novel before. It's not just that one storyline connects to the next, which connects to the next, and so on in a big chain; each storyline relates to several others in a complex web of interconnectedness.
At the beginning, the three main storylines are that of the Family, that of Harry Houdini, and that of the whole White-Nesbit-Thaw affair. Each of these three connects to both of the others - Houdini's car crashes in front of the Family's house and he chitchats with them while he's waiting on repairs, Houdini meets Harry K. Thaw at the Tombs in a particularly disturbing scene, and Mother's Younger Brother meets Evelyn Nesbit inside Emma Goldman's room in an even more disturbing scene.
There are other storylines, of course. Nesbit and Goldman met in the first place through Tateh and his daughter, who, along with Nesbit, made an appearance during Sigmund Freud's parade through New York. Tateh, Mameh, and their daughter, right after they were introduced in the story and well before Nesbit came into the picture, took a train to Madison Avenue and looked at a row of mansions that outraged the socialist in Tateh and were designed by none other than Stanford White. After learning of Nesbit's identity, Tateh took his daughter and left New York, and his travels just happened to take him through New Rochelle, where he just happened to be passed by by Mother and her son, the latter of which shared a long gaze with Tateh's daughter. After that, they passed through Bridgeport, which Doctorow specifically identified as the burial place of Tom Thumb, whose widow, of course, had spoken to Harry Houdini.
Houdini, meanwhile, was about to embark on a trip to Europe to do some soul-searching. At about this time, he felt particularly outdone by Robert Peary, who had just discovered the North Pole (well, maybe...) - with Father aboard his expedition. While in Europe, he purchased a Voisin biplane and learned to fly it, leading to the appearance of one final historical figure in the first part of the book - the now-iconic Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose entry into the story harkens back to Houdini's original meeting with the Family and the little boy's last words to him: "Warn the Duke."
Very good eye--you lay out many of the interwoven threads of a narrative that can sometimes seem rather random and arbitrary in its structure. Many of these slender connections will become more substantial as the novel unfolds, but you make a strong case that it isn't nearly as arbitrary as it might appear. One more link to notice: the little boy in the family saves Tateh's silhouettes from the trash, after Younger Brother threw them out, after taking them from Evelyn when she left him for another man--and the one he saves and hangs in his closet is of the little girl who was looking at him from the back of the streetcar! So the thread between the little boy and the little girl is going both ways.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the things that I really liked about Ragtime, was how Doctorow was able to take several totally different stories and make them all connect. It was fascinating. Made the book more interesting to read, and I think it would even make an interesting re-read because we would always be noticing things we didn't before. It'd be like watching a movie twice and noticing the prop placement in the background that foreshadows something, or an offhand comment from a character that actually meant a lot later..yeah.
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