"Ragtime"

[fiefoe]

The author has a peculiarly authoritative way to disclose the private moments and thoughts of historical figures. ('Through the night Dreiser turned his chair in circles seeking the proper alignment.') Paradoxically, that he is an novelist instead of a biographer helps to make him sound so convincing.

• People who did not respond to his art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless.
• So Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe{?!}, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler.
• There was a kind of act that used the real world for its stage. He couldn't touch it. For all his achievements he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.
  

• [Morgan] had sensed in Ford's achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet.
• He knew as no one else the cold and barren reaches of unlimited success.
• He looked into the eyes of Rembrandt burghers and Greco prelates as if to find kingdoms of truth that would bring him to his knees.
  

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