[An] unanticipated glow of recognition comes over the [critic of Heinrich von Kleist, a German dramatist and short story writer,] who, reading leisurely as directed through E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, discovers amid the likes of Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford a black couple whose actions take on an increasingly deja vu aura. The two produce an illegitimate daughter which the mother, Sarah, buries alive. The protagonist family discovers and resuscitates the child and takes it in to live along with its mother. On the scene at the narrator's home arrives one Sunday the father of the child, one Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a proper and dignified ragtime pianist who, when refused an audience by Sarah, contents himself with genuflection at the cradle of his child and a few Scott Joplin rags at the family piano. The visits become routine, become a courtship of Sarah after the...