Like U.S.A., Ragtime contains a satiric commentary upon the development of American society in the early years of the twentieth century…. While Doctorow evinces a far keener awareness of the problems stemming from sexual and racial oppression in the prewar period, he and Dos Passos are similarly concerned with formulating a radical critique of capitalism. At the same time both authors infuse into their portraits a curious admixture of nostalgia…. (p. 86)

In addition, despite some evident disparities in technique, Ragtime and U.S.A. have a number of crucial structural elements in common. The anonymous Boy who provides Doctorow's most important angle of fictional vision—and who might indeed be the narrator himself as a child—performs a function very like that of Dos Passos' Camera Eye: both respond with almost excruciating sensitivity to the callousness of their historical worlds and thus furnish a naive but...