E.L. Doctorow died yesterday.
As a teenager, I had been happily snacking my way through fine mid-level fiction from Alex Haley and James Michener when I stumbled upon Doctorow’s Ragtime. Stumbled upon is not really accurate, my literate mother had, with admirable subterfuge, left it on the table in my room without comment. So I wandered in and emerged a different person. The audacity of it, particularly the mixing of fictional characters with historical ones (Freud, Jung, Houdini, Emma Goldman, Theodore Dreiser), the impossible New York of the 20s, the impudent eschewing of quotation marks in dialogue, the the author’s quiet rage around the politics of race and class left me permanently branded – that a book should so unravel me, that mere symbols on a page could be so transformative- it left me with a hunger for this sort of art that has sustained and thrilled me for decades. It brought me to writing and it made the best of fiction larger and truer than life. I remember going to my mother and asking for more like this – leading directly to Roth and Updike and Heller and a lifelong, fully requited literary love affair with certain kind of writing.
I have read a number of other Doctorow books (I have loved them all), but I will now read Ragtime as my version of a homily in his honour.
