[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...