Father dies, Coalhouse Walker dies, Young Brother dies. Emma Goldman is deported. Mother and Baron Ashkenazy get married and move to California. And a bunch of other stuff happens. Yay! The End.
For a book that spent the first 300 pages inventing all these fictional but totally historical characters as well as historical but definitely fictional characters and making them run into each other and say and do lots of Crazy Sh*t, the ending just felt way too abrupt and almost lacking on Doctorow's part. Granted, he might be trying to make a point about the flow of history at the end and I wouldn't know since I don't really get what he's doing for most of the book anyways, it just felt like all of this interesting build up was for nothing and Doctorow got bored of writing and so he killed half his characters and made the rest of them get out of New York. I get that this isn't just a work of fiction and that he's also trying to depict how history plays out through his novel but it just felt way too abrupt and out of place considering how the first 39 or so chapters were written. The writing style was fine, just felt very out of place and gave an abrupt ending to such a massive buildup.
As a chapter by itself though, I think that Doctorow's depiction of how history and time move on is really interesting, especially since he wrote this book about the early 1900s in the late 1900s and we're reading it in the 21st century. In the moment, like for people living during the 1910s, the sinking of the Lusitania or the assassination of the Archduke and his wife may not have felt like it was the end of one era and everything that was "in" yesterday has to go today. Doctorow talks about how the era of Ragtime, presumably referencing not just the historical period of Ragtime but also his conveniently titled book Ragtime, had run out (336). While I don't really like this interpretation of history as something that can be cleanly divided into eras and that one day, the present era just ends and a new one begins and it's all good (since everyone from the past either dies or moves away!), I do think it reflects the fact that upcoming and developing conflicts do have an impact in making the events of the past seem almost "small" - the looming war in Europe obviously makes Father and the Peary Expedition's quest to locate the North Pole seem almost lofty. So while this chapter felt extremely awkward when put at the end of so much buildup, I do get many of the points Doctorow's trying to make about the flow and significance of history. Or maybe not.
