[E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Robert Altman's Nashville explore] the way the private, unpublicized lives of our political and intellectual heroes interact with the fantasies of the American public; both Doctorow and Altman emphasize a singular popular form—ragtime and country music—as the variable that brings together our leaders and the public whose subconscious dreams they project…. [In] Ragtime Doctorow employs an unusual "March of Time"-type narrative that situates the famous and the not-so-famous on a literal, two-dimensional plane. (p. 56)

Doctorow does away with the major features of the epic, historical novel with its grand, descriptive passages and broad psychological portraits. Through his kinky and ironic use of archaic story devices, as in never telling us the name of the family but always referring to them as Father, Mother, etc., Doctorow bypasses many of the austere rules Robbe-Grillet and other French writers laid down for the "new novel." By giving a swift kick in the pants to those historians and aesthetes who propose sumptuous, intellectual schemes, Doctorow reduces history and theory to a fanciful game we all can play.

Doctorow's archetypal American family then becomes our surrogate dreamers; they play as critical a role in his "March of Time" narrative as their more famous political and cultural contemporaries. The four principal members of this family, Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, and the Little Boy, not only merge with the "lives of the great," but become as responsible in the forging of our character as our celebrated leaders.

The reason for Doctorow's turning to the first years of this century and focusing on a musical form that in this era gained some notoriety becomes increasingly apparent. America was assimilating more and more people and races; ragtime's application of certain rules of European music is viewed as representing the diversity of the American cultural experience. (pp. 56-7)

[Doctorow] rarely turns away from depicting [his] characters as other than shadowy figures brought to life by his own magic lantern show. We respond to the politicians and cultural prophets in our dizzying century as delightfully infectious heroes and villains from our fantasy world, united in their purpose and sense of history with Doctorow's archetypal family who create their own travelogue of history and myth. (p. 57)