Time defeats us in two ways: it bullies us by pursuit, and it mocks us with evasion. We grow older; we are consumed. Yet, at the same time, the events that practice on our mortality, that "do us in," are themselves disordered, senseless, refusing to cohere. E. L. Doctorow is a remarkable novelist precisely because he confronts the mockery of time directly and attempts to master it with footwork fancier and more playful….

[In] The Book of Daniel Doctorow already demonstrated his preoccupation with actual history, with real event. The outstanding achievement of that book was to establish a linearity that threaded among the confusions of three decades…. The central metaphor was brilliant. The images spectacularly appropriate. Equally impressive was Doctorow's handling of the tension between the character Daniel—the Daniel Agonistes—and the narrating Daniel, the desperate sardonic intelligence determined to see it all in pattern and in place….

This sense of directly engaging history—"The real-world act" Doctorow calls it in [Ragtime]—and of bringing to the contest intelligence and wit, identifies Ragtime, unmistakably, as a sequel to Daniel…. Like so much in the novel,… the slicing of time is a many-sided metaphor as well as a reality, a framework for comic distortion as well as a metaphor…. The reconstruction and division of history is obviously a tentative, slippery business, impossible as it is humanly inevitable….

In making meaning out of history, ambiguity is a richness that cannot safely be trimmed away. And Doctorow does as little trimming as possible. He merely pushes an ambiguity in one or more directions. (p. 310)

Still, if random history is to be disciplined, it will be put in order only by sacrificing history, by substituting in its stead a human design. In The Book of Daniel Doctorow gets out of this dilemma by dramatizing a tension between the "two" Daniels, by dramatizing the balance and the will necessary to cross the distance between event and pattern. In Ragtime he executes a more comic and audacious maneuver.

Narrated history either understates or overstates. Therefore, Doctorow does both—and pulls his distortions center stage. He proclaims them. He delights in them. He comments about them. On the more intimate level of personal history, we have the families of Father-Mother-Younger Brother and, eventually revealed, their immigrant counterparts in the family of Tateh-Mameh. Their namelessness and the anonymity of Doctorow's staccato prose emphasizes a presentation as flattened as Tateh's silhouettes. (The ambiguous metaphor strikes again.) They are allegories of American history, of the melting pot, of the middle-class life, of making sacrifices, or making good in technological, democratic U.S.A. Whatever the intricacies of their roles, they follow prescribed allegorical destinies as surely as characters in Hawthorne. Heartbreak or joy may lie just beyond their outlines, but it is only the suggestion that Doctorow wants. Otherwise he controls by refusing them dimension and keeping their very excesses within an obvious comic understatement. Even the black Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his Sarah begin as limited, contained personal histories—though their tragedy is that they become part of a larger, more public history.

On the other hand, in dealing with the public record, Doctorow goes to the opposite extreme and pronounces control, not by diminution but by the most flamboyant augmentation. The facts he uses are crucial to his purpose, for through them he can demonstrate the range of the liberties he is taking, the vigor of his comic sweep….

The outrageous, the hyperbolic, the impossible—these are the elements from which Doctorow fashions a coherence so factitious and arbitrary it no longer distorts, but attains a purity and comic integrity of its own. (p. 311)

For all the differences of tone and manner, public event and private history both exhibit related aspects of Doctorow's showmanship and comic control. (p. 312)