Almost all British critics, and by now several thousand common readers, will have come to the conclusion that Mr Doctorow spent the years between the writing of his last and excellent novel, The Book of Daniel, and the birth of Ragtime constructing a plot. The plot was not simply that of a novel, but of a sales campaign. The plot succeeded: Doctorow's truly dedicated researches yielded a formula for success, and a style in which to clothe it most gaudily. Reflective readers will forgive me for finding Ragtime as meretricious as the bicentennial celebrations themselves….

My reasons for finding Ragtime so appalling will be known to those who have read more than one other review of it. There is the too-deft split-level plot, which manages to splatter its pages with a little nostalgia here, a little noble left-wing sentiment there, and lashings of semen wherever the reader's interest threatens to wane. There is the name-dropping…. With one exception the fictitious characters at the would-be centre of the book have no proper names: they are called Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, and in the case of the East Side Jewish immigrant contingent, Tateh and Mameh. Doctorow's splendid gift for inventing names is matched by his skill at characterising their bearers. The exception, Coalhouse Walker, an absolutely bourgeois black man who is supposed to be a musical disciple of Scott Joplin, is given a name, presumably because it would be too difficult to manipulate him from respectability to armed rebellion without a handle; and what would one call him—The Black Man? The Negro?—without alienating the book's natural constituency of trendies….

It is widely supposed that Ragtime raises certain points of a philosophical nature concerning the relation of history and fiction. A dust-jacket philosopher, George Stade, reviewing Ragtime in the New York Times Book Review [see CLC, Vol. 6], said that 'in this excellent novel, silhouettes and rags not only make fiction out of history but also reveal the fictions out of which history is made'. This bold statement is false on two counts: Ragtime is not excellent and it does not 'reveal the fictions out of which history is made', at least, not in any way that actually illuminates the history of America in the period in which it is set, the ten years before the 1914–18 War. On the third count, it is true that Ragtime 'makes fiction out of history', that is, it falsifies history. Freud, Jung, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Pierpont Morgan, Stanford White and Harry Houdini simply did not perpetrate the grotesqueries they are made to commit in its pages. That is all. There is no problem. The characters in Ragtime that bear those famous names are not historical personages; they are merely pawns in Doctorow's particularly dotty and tasteless game of chess. (p. 21)

I rather sympathise with the view of the Oxford don who, discussing Doctorow's pretensions, told me that what enrages him is writers of genuine historical novels who get their facts wrong. Ragtime he dismissed as beneath consideration. (pp. 21-2)