SOURCE: Benson, Sheila. “Ragtime—An Optimistic Novel Lost in Translation.” Los Angeles Times (15 November 1981): Calendar section, p. 29.

In the following review, Benson asserts that much of the depth of E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is lost in its film adaptation.

E. L. Doctorow's bold exhilarating novel Ragtime, his “real-world act,” was a newsreel of America at a critical period, from 1902 until just the end of World War I when “the era of Ragtime had run out.” America at that time combined innocence, optimism, energy and personal and social ambition at levels it would never reach again.

And in the book every character and virtually every detail was interdependent. Doctorow created three fictional family groups: a comfortable middle-class New Rochelle bunting and fireworks manufacturer's family called simply Father, Mother, their Little Boy and her Younger Brother; a Latvian-Jewish immigrant family in New York's Lower East Side, Tateh (meaning father...