Generally, the reviews of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime have all been superlative, praising the novel as a rare evocation of American history and imagined life during the critical years before and during World War I…. Against the panorama of this era, with all of its turbulence and fury, an imagined family seeks its way toward the dreams of a peculiar brand of human achievement and ultimately to the ironic discovery of the dissolution of its dreams. At every level, Doctorow's narrative is compelling and painful in its intensity—both for the personal fate of its people and for its powerful imprint of a century in the making.

The history of an age is always deceptive because it lacks the vivid dramatization of life experienced internally…. Ragtime is history, but it is the past recreated in the dreams of its people. As the drama unfolds, the distant music of a "ragtime" beat echoes over all events, a symbolic and rhythmic pattern capturing the clash of two different meters being played simultaneously. Doctorow's fictional triumph resides in his narrative skill and balance of the sounds of life in its deceptive search for pattern—some desperate means to give intelligibility to human experience, to construct, however false, some connection with the teeming venture of life.

Counterpointed against the insistent beat of human ideals is the equally insistent jangle of gratuitous events, both public and private. All is moving in time, in the common measure of man's days. To create the sense of "moving" time and its painful presence, Doctorow has interspersed his narrative with dates and public figures about whose existence we have a relative sense of place and history…. The intricacies of Doctorow's plot refuse summary statement; and are not as important as the aura he creates about the nature of destiny itself—both American and human.

Doctorow's novel has been favorably compared with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and its luminous projection of lost innocence. Less favorably, Ragtime has been viewed as a mirror image of Altman's Nashville…. [But in] Nashville there is no sense of witnessing an historical moment, an era at the edge—as distinct from journalistic information. Ragtime, on the other hand, seizes the feel of human actuality and recreates a crucial turning in the "great experiment" of American life—a fusion of fact and interpretation, of history and imaginative illumination.

Two related charges against Doctorow have been voiced. First, as the detached and distanced author, he has successfully removed himself from the arena of moral commitment; he refuses judgment on the reality he creates. Secondly, at least one critic has maintained that Ragtime cannot bear the scrutiny of a second or third reading; namely, that it lacks a sustaining power for reflective thought. It projects a fascinating moment of Americana, but its drift is self-contained and intensive. Both of these commentaries flow from a theory of literature which insists on "idea" and corporate "value," namely, that literature will lead us to the light. Ragtime offers no ready references of ethical directions or indirections. Like a host of contemporary writers, Doctorow places the burden of interpretation upon the reader who must merge the fictional experience with the evolving richness of his own unique and peculiar experience, a fusion, different for each reader, an interpretation of experience which is self-creating.

In Ragtime, Doctorow has invented and made actual the felt experiences of our national heritage, a perplexing and often confusing clash of ideals and dreams. Doctorow has said that Ragtime is his private response to an age that prizes nonfiction over the power of imaginative literature. His success is absolute in Ragtime. (pp. 132-33)