336 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0812978186
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow is…peculiar. Not bad. Just…peculiar. Allow me to elaborate. The novel features several real-life individuals who lived during the time the novel is set, in New York City between about 1902 through 1912, but centers especially on a (nameless) family living in New Rochelle, New York, referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather and “the little boy”, Father and Mother’s young son. The family is wealthy because their business makes American flags and fireworks, an easy source of wealth due to the national enthusiasm for patriotic displays at this time.
The peculiarity comes in the way the novel is structured, in which a nameless narrator guides the reader through a series of events – some historical, some invented – that happens to and around this nameless family, but in a rambling, steam-of-consciousness fashion in which one sentence runs on into another and thoughts butt-up together without letup. I imagined our mysterious narrator to be an elderly person, sitting in a sun-lit room at the top of an old Queen Anne house – built sometime when these events occurred – rambling on about the glorious events that happened when he was still in knickers (probably Father and Mother’s young son from the book).
Doctorow’s style of writing in this book is rather journalistic: straightforward, direct and fluid, but with only sketchy character development, which is not surprising as the characters aren’t meant to be people but rather archetypes that represent ideals rather than persons. Overall, the book reads as if a progressive writer/reporter chose to highlight the eccentricities of the rich and famous (never mind their contributions to America) and romanticize the down-and-out, struggling underclass as victims of the rich, greedy, and mean-spirited. Tiresome and typical. Oh, and Doctorow evidently loves long paragraphs, seeing as there are so many of them.
So then, is Ragtime a bad book? Well…No, it’s just that, to reiterate, the structure is peculiar. To readjust my prior descriptions, it rather resembles a piece of ragtime music, which is syncopated; that is, a variety of rhythms are played together to make a piece of music, making part or all the music off-beat or “ragged”. And so in Ragtime, we have a series of fictional and historical scenarios and vignettes interweaved together to the rough, relentless beat of history – to the drive of the music; the book twists and jives from one event, one thought, one happening to another, never concerning itself where one ends and another begins, so long as the beat goes on.
