Ragtime
RAGTIME (E.L. Doctorow) - Three Stars
About 200-pages into the novel, despite Doctorow's unsettling, choppy writing style and a fairly pretentious concept, I had to smile with the realization that Ragtime had made me like it. It's not a masterpiece by any means, but it is a decent little story that paints a vivid portrait of early 20th-century America.
The story details the lives of three families during this time period, and how their lives are interwoven thanks largely to chance encounters or detailings with famous people like Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis, Stanford White, Robert Peary, and others. It's a little bit of a contrived premise, but thankfully skirts just this side of "Crash-itis" (named after the truly horrible film whose forced and manipulative connections fairly raped one's suspension of disbelief).
Ragtime is nearly void of complex sentence structure, and Doctorow's almost perfunctory style of prose takes some getting used to. Sentences are short and to the point, fired off almost like bullets: "Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." At first I found this writing style made it difficult to find a "flow" to the novel, which is probably why it took me a month to read the under-300 page novel (as fast as a glacier!).
Two aspects of Ragtime I feel are particularly noteworthy. The first of these is the unusual narration, which bounces back and forth between third-person omniscient and first-person plural (the editorial "we," as The Dude might say). This leads me to believe that the narrator is actually two narrators (specifically, The Little Boy from Family #1 and The Little Girl from Family #2, telling the story in retrospect as grown-ups), though the narration continuously passes between the voices without revealing the "who" behind them.
The second aspect I found noteworthy is the fact that, of the three main protagonist families in the book, only the black family receives actual names (Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, and Coalhouse Walker III). The two white families are referred to only as Father, Mother, (Mother's) Younger Brother, Grandfather and Little Boy (Family #1); and Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl (Family #2). In a book where two of the main themes are loss of personal identity and race relations, I found this an especially poignant touch.
About 200-pages into the novel, despite Doctorow's unsettling, choppy writing style and a fairly pretentious concept, I had to smile with the realization that Ragtime had made me like it. It's not a masterpiece by any means, but it is a decent little story that paints a vivid portrait of early 20th-century America.
The story details the lives of three families during this time period, and how their lives are interwoven thanks largely to chance encounters or detailings with famous people like Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis, Stanford White, Robert Peary, and others. It's a little bit of a contrived premise, but thankfully skirts just this side of "Crash-itis" (named after the truly horrible film whose forced and manipulative connections fairly raped one's suspension of disbelief).
Ragtime is nearly void of complex sentence structure, and Doctorow's almost perfunctory style of prose takes some getting used to. Sentences are short and to the point, fired off almost like bullets: "Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." At first I found this writing style made it difficult to find a "flow" to the novel, which is probably why it took me a month to read the under-300 page novel (as fast as a glacier!).
Two aspects of Ragtime I feel are particularly noteworthy. The first of these is the unusual narration, which bounces back and forth between third-person omniscient and first-person plural (the editorial "we," as The Dude might say). This leads me to believe that the narrator is actually two narrators (specifically, The Little Boy from Family #1 and The Little Girl from Family #2, telling the story in retrospect as grown-ups), though the narration continuously passes between the voices without revealing the "who" behind them.
The second aspect I found noteworthy is the fact that, of the three main protagonist families in the book, only the black family receives actual names (Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, and Coalhouse Walker III). The two white families are referred to only as Father, Mother, (Mother's) Younger Brother, Grandfather and Little Boy (Family #1); and Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl (Family #2). In a book where two of the main themes are loss of personal identity and race relations, I found this an especially poignant touch.
posted by Kevin at 5:31 PM
0 comments
