Second paragraph of third chapter:

Every season of the year wagons came through the streets and picked up bodies of derelicts. Late at night old ladies in babushkas came to the morgue looking for their husbands and sons. The corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.

This was the best-selling book of 1975 in America, though Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot has proven to have more staying power. It’s set in the period from 1902 to 1915, mostly in New Rochelle, New York, and concerns a white family (referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather, and ‘the little boy’) and their relationship with a young black woman, her pianist boyfriend and their baby, and also a older Jewish man and his young daughter; but also all of these interweave with many famous people of the time, notably Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and the intriguing socialite Evelyn Nesbit, who I hadn’t previously heard of and who sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to see how much of her story as told here was true (answer: most of it).

I really enjoyed this. I thought that the spirit of the age was convincingly portrayed, and the motivations of the characters always crystal clear and consistent. There is a gripping subplot about a racist fire chief who harasses the pianist, and the pianist’s revenge. The people seem like real people and the places real places. You can get Ragtime here.

I was surprised to see, however, that Ragtime was on the (very long ballot) for that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel. I wouldn’t classify it as speculative fiction, not even as alternative history – the world is supposed to be our world, and historical events all take place as we know them to have taken place. But there were nineteen books on the ballot that year, so perhaps it was a quirk of the rules combined with some imaginative nominating. The winner of both Hugo and Nebula that year was The Forever War, with the other Nebula nominees including The Female Man, The Computer Connection, Invisible Cities, Dhalgren, (The) Missing Man, The Stochastic Man and my personal favourite Doorways in the Sand.