[As] John Barth pointed out some time ago, the modern, or at least the modernist, novel is in constant danger of petering out into a one-sentence idea whose actual performance over the length of a book is of little consequence…. On this level, Ragtime is an immense success. When the first rumours of it were filtering out from the advance extracts published in New American Review, I heard of it as one might hear a new joke that is going the rounds of the office. Here was this new book that had Freud and Jung riding through the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island together … fantastic! What did they do in the Tunnel of Love, I asked. They … well … they ride through the Tunnel of Love. It's the idea, don't you see? Indeed, in the book itself, this memorable occasion takes up exactly as much space as it was allotted in my informant's report. Freud and Jung took a boat together through the Tunnel of Love. And Ragtime is chock-a-block with glittering, unexamined conceits of that kind—little firecrackers that glow with suggestive, but finally fraudulent brilliance, because they can be pursued no further than the sentence which encapsulates them.

The brightness of Ragtime—and it is a consistently bright, thoroughly readable book—tends to be of this variety. It flares up on the page, and as quickly dies. Begged questions are lost in the hiss of the next firework. Doctorow is never less than a stylish writer; but whether he actually has a style is questionable…. [His] sharpness and verbal ingenuity are undeniable. But there is an odd dissociation between the writer and his object…. It is impossible to deduce a sensibility from behind [his] kind of prose. It is connected neither to the character through whose eyes we are supposed to be looking, nor, in any meaningful sense, to the author. Here is language caught in the act of freeloading—a skillful mode of writing which is indigenous to journalism but which tastes unsatisfyingly bland in a novel. When Doctorow escapes "the little world of personal experience which has bound the novel", he moves into the big world of the smart colour feature—a freedom which is disputable, to say the least.

Whatever its supposed limitations, at least the world of personal experience operates to a system of strenuous internal logic. In most novels, things happen because they are necessary to the narrative, because the situation dictates or requires them. In Ragtime, they just happen…. [His] coincidentallys and meanwhiles are no coincidence; they are basic materials in the fabric of Ragtime and they betray the essential triviality of its relationship to the public historical world in which Doctorow has invested so much faith. He grasps arbitrarily and wildly at public facts and events like a man trying to hitch lifts on the wings of passing eagles. The first third of the novel (and it is worth mentioning that Doctorow performs most of his tricks early on, and Ragtime soon subsides into a quite conventionally-told, moderately exciting story) hops and skips from private to public, from one batch of characters to another, by means of these spurious linkages. Sometimes Doctorow has the air of a frantic amateur stage manager who finds that he has lost half his cast by the middle of Act Two of H.M.S. Pinafore. "And what of Tateh and his little girl?" he enquires, in the first sentence of Chapter Twelve. To which the reader can only reply, Well, you should know. Sometimes the sheer difficulty of trying to keep a whole chunk of American history on the go leads him to try, Busby Berkeley fashion, for set-pieces which will keep the entire cast doing the same thing at the same time.

All across the continent merchants pressed the large round keys of their registers.

And woe betide the unfortunate merchant who happened to be picking his nose at the time.

The idea of mixing public and private, imagined and real, is eloquent in synopsis (as it is eloquent in the many adulatory reviews which Ragtime has collected). But in execution, it turns out to be terribly clumsy. The various bits of the novel look as if they had been joined to one another by strips of sticky tape, and Doctorow has made no particular effort to match the bias of the materials. His private characters are fey-sentimental, and the period New York in which they live—a city of heartrending poverty, gaslit colour, etcetera—is by Malamud (in The Magic Barrel and The Assistant), out of Henry Roth (in Call It Sleep) and Abraham Cahan (in what is really the first major descriptive novel of the Lower East Side, The Rise of David Levinsky). Passages like [the one] in which the real Evelyn Nesbit visits the tenement where the imaginary Tateh lives with his daughter, are simply ersatz-writing. (pp. 72-4)

But it is the public characters who are the least satisfactory. Doctorow has not reinvented or reimagined them. He has bought their crude popular images off the peg, and simply put them, on rows of hangers, into his book…. If History was too important to be left to historians, Doctorow has made it over to the most orthodox school of caricaturists. He has stripped his public characters of their individuality, and their only claim to life in Ragtime is that their names were once attached to real people….

The point at which the book really settles down is where it starts on the story of Coalhouse Walker…. Here Doctorow's prose is as efficiently gripping as, say, Peter Benchley's in Jaws, and questions of depth and character are kept at bay by the race of the plot.

That is the trouble with Ragtime. The moment one begins to question it on any grounds of serious literary merit, it falls apart—a cunning, fragile house of cards. Its major interest lies in the way in which it suggests a recipe for the contemporary bestseller. It is written to be read fast: too much attention on the reader's part kills it stone-dead. It is a splendid book to talk about—a big, party-size idea which is itself stuffed with attractive little ideas. It is designed to titillate the imagination without overstretching it. Its prose will present no difficulties, and will offer numerous small pleasures, to those who prefer reading magazines to reading books. There will be a very large number of people who know little, and care less, about either the novel or history, who will see Ragtime as the most dazzlingly sophisticated exploration of both the novel and history that they have ever read. (p. 74)