The March
Ragtime
Billy Bathgate
Loon Lake
The cakewalking manner and the sentimental soul of Ragtime nourish each other, but in Loon Lake style and substance are out of kilter. Doctorow, possibly realizing how little heft the bony, disagreeable story of Loon Lake has, weighs the book down with style.
Books Loon Lake
- Author
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E. L. Doctorow
Whitney Balliett
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Ragtime, comic and working with simpler material, risked less and succeeded, but one could complain of the stately and ambitious Loon Lake that by attempting to look more broadly at American history, it seems the more constrained by an ideology which explains or convokes the experience of only some Americans, without having the exemplary power of an ambiguous fictional world to expand the experience of others.