Okay, so the book doesn't actually talk about...well, any of those things, really. But E. L. Doctorow's novel is set in the freewheeling ragtime era of the U.S.--when only about three white guys got to be millionaires, and we could still confine those pesky immigrants to a few tenements in New York. It's a fictionalized historical narrative, weaving the stories of made-up characters with real people like crime-of-passion-inducing Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, a Jocasta-happy Harry Houdini, and unapologetically rich J.P. Morgan.
The celebrities move in and out of the narrative, mostly to remind us that this is an Important Historical Novel, grounded in actual political-social-sexual upheavals. For instance, Emma Goldman gives Evelyn Nesbit a lecture on feminist freedom--with a happy ending (yes, that kind of happy ending). J.P. Morgan contemplates his richness, at home and abroad. And Houdini lives with his mother while wowing crowds of socialites and doing his feats of escape and endurance.
The real heart of the story is the fictional characters, who fall into three parts (though these mix at several points):1. An upper-class family from 1910-ish New Rochelle, who begin to shake off their WASPy bourgeoisness (is that a word?) and join the "new" America. The mother takes in an abandoned black baby (and later his mother). Her younger brother stalks Evelyn Nesbit for a while, then gets involved in domestic anarchist groups. The son interacts freely with a Jewish child of immigrants. And the father starts to realize that maybe African-American people desire (and deserve) the same protections in society that he gets.
2. A pianist from Harlem, the father of the abandoned baby, who snaps after a personal tragedy and forces a new racial consciousness on the city via the media and oddly placid domestic terrorism. His is the most compelling story, and the most tied to the shift in social consciousness at the time.
3. A Jewish immigrant and his young daughter, who manage to get out of urban poverty and into the movie business...somehow. 90% of it happens offscreen. The kid is amazingly beautiful, and his desire to protect her from predators keeps moving him into the right place at the right time. His story intersects with the WASP family's in a fairly uncontroversial way, ultimately leading to one of the biggest "I want my money back" book endings I can think of.
All of that might sound like I didn't care for the book--I did, overall. Doctorow has an agenda of melding fiction and history, and gets points for never wavering from that. Writing from the 1970s, he has the luxury of long-perspective social commentary, which a writer closer to the ragtime era just wouldn't have had. And appropriating long-dead historical figures is a little unfair (he fictionalizes others, however thinly, in at least one of his other books), but it's a time-honored literary tradition. Also, I liked the writing itself better than Jacob did, for the most part. I think Doctorow was going for the slick, neat package, and once I accepted that, the lack of penetrating language didn't really bother me much.
Parts I enjoyed:
"Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest."
"The events since [Father's] return from the Arctic, his response to them, had broken [Mother's] faith in him....Yet at moments, for whole days at a time, she loved him as before--with a sense of appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn't know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she never waited for it."
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