[As] John Barth pointed out some time ago, the modern, or at least the modernist, novel is in constant danger of petering out into a one-sentence idea whose actual performance over the length of a book is of little consequence…. On this level, Ragtime is an immense success. When the first rumours of it were filtering out from the advance extracts published in New American Review, I heard of it as one might hear a new joke that is going the rounds of the office. Here was this new book that had Freud and Jung riding through the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island together … fantastic! What did they do in the Tunnel of Love, I asked. They … well … they ride through the Tunnel of Love. It's the idea, don't you see? Indeed, in the book itself, this memorable occasion takes up exactly as much space as it...