History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Accuracy: Deliberately mixes real historical figures with invented events, blurring fact and fiction.
• Readability: Brisk, ironic and cinematic, with short declarative sentences.
• Plot: Three families, one affluent, one immigrant and one Black, intersect with famous people in America before the First World War.

In New Rochelle, New York, a prosperous family, Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother and the Little Boy, lives comfortably. Their lives become entangled with Tateh, a Jewish immigrant artist, and Coalhouse Walker, a Black ragtime pianist. Around them move Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit and others.

E.L. Doctorow’s novel was a sensation because of its style and its mixing of history and fiction. Real people meet fictional characters in invented scenes, and the narrator describes them with the same flat, ironic tone.

The heart of the novel is the story of Coalhouse Walker, whose car is vandalised by racist firemen. When he is denied justice, he turns to violence, seizing the Morgan Library. His story exposes the racism and inequality behind the era’s optimism.

Doctorow’s prose, with its short sentences and absence of quotation marks, gives the book a rhythm like ragtime music. The novel is full of set pieces and ironic observations.

The weakness is that the characters are often types, and the playful handling of history can seem glib. Some readers find the ironic tone cold.

The 8 reflects an original and influential novel that won the first National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It was filmed in 1981 and adapted as a Broadway musical in 1998.