There are certain great moments in fiction, when the vast mists of the world suddenly part; Blind Date has one of them: 'Levanter could not speak. Mute, dispirited, he started the engine. Without pausing to look back, Jaques Monod walked away. As he started to climb the steps to the house, the last rays of the setting sun wrapped him in their glow.' I haven't come across such a potent combination of effects since I last opened an American novel, but the mixture here of name-dropping, cheap romance and rather precious fictionalising succeeds mainly by being worse than anything that has come before it. Ragtime turned this particular tone into an industrial process. It consists of saying as little as possible in the largest possible space—while at the same time convincing the reader that he is part of an amazing and genuinely historical experience. But the...