It irks me a fair bit that I just read a book in which at least half, if not more, of the main characters died at the end and never for a moment felt even the slightest pang of sadness. Or happiness, or heart-warmed-ness, or any other tender emotion for that matter. I felt a lot of anger, if that's at all important, and at exactly four points—I counted—was at least somewhat amused and came close to chuckling.
In all seriousness, though, I really am disappointed when I look back on Ragtime and think about how little emotion it elicited from me, despite all the potentially interesting plots it introduced at various points. Quite honestly, I feel cheated—like there was so much to know about all of the characters in this novel, and yet they're still basically strangers to me even now that I've read the whole thing.
Take Younger Brother, for instance: He was with us throughout the entire book and, on the surface, seemed to follow an extremely interesting path from when we first met him to when he finally passed away. Yet, as much as I've read about Younger Brother, I don't feel connected to him in the slightest. He's an intriguing character, yes, but that's all he'll ever be to me; he just doesn't feel like a person. He has a body, he has a mind—and a rather fascinating one at that, I admit—but one thing Doctorow neglects to give him, along with virtually every other character in his novel, is a heart. He's just the bare skeleton of a character—a hollow Tin Man, if you'll pardon my cheesy allusion to The Wizard of Oz—and consequently, he's never really going to mean anything to me. Heck, I don't even know his name.
The sad thing was that these characters had backstories; it was just that Doctorow refused to acknowledge them most of the time. The passage at the very beginning of Chapter 29, for example, was one of my favorites in the novel because it suddenly made Father so much more real and more human. However, it was remarkably short-lived, and I was yet again left disappointed, as I was so many times throughout this novel.
What's worse is that I can't chock all these woefully unsatisfying characters up to Doctorow's being a bad writer—or, I could potentially chock it up to that, but I can't chock it up to his being unintelligent. Good writer or not, he definitely knew what he was doing with this novel and portrayed the characters so emptily because that was how he wanted them portrayed. Thus, I wonder what the point of it all could possibly have been. I don't feel like I really learned anything about the time period, as there were so many complete falsehoods sprinkled in with facts that I couldn't rely on anything I read without checking it elsewhere first; I don't feel like I got a deep message out of the novel, as every seemingly didactic passage was either undercut by sarcasm or contradicted later in the book; and, finally, I don't feel like I enjoyed the experience at all because I couldn't relate to the characters. So why did I even read it to begin with?
Unfortunately, I don't have any answer for that question better than, "I had to read it for class," which is sort of a shame, if you ask me. Doctorow outlined so many plots throughout the course of Ragtime that could have made for powerful, interesting stories all on their own, but he never let me delve deep enough into any of them to actually be moved. I can honestly say that I just read a book, but I'd hesitate to say that I read a novel because a novel is a work of art and, in my opinion, words on a page don't constitute art unless the author's heart is actually in them, and I just didn't get that sense with Ragtime.
But, at the same time, I do have to say that I think Doctorow probably accomplished whatever it was he wanted to accomplish with Ragtime because I wouldn't for a moment believe that he was originally trying to write a moving, emotional novel and just failed miserably at it. I can't say I know what exactly he was trying to write—in fact, to be perfectly honest, I haven't the slightest clue what on earth it might have been that he wanted to write—but whatever it was, it wasn't the kind of novel I like to read.
The funny thing is that it wouldn't have been hard at all to make me feel connected to just one of Ragtime's many characters; I'm really kind of a softy when it comes to novels and quite likely would have cried at at least one, if not all, of the many deaths in the book had one of my favorite authors written it. But, you know, pulling on readers' emotional strings just doesn't seem to be E.L. Doctorow's thing, PoMoMoFo that he is (new term I just made up; stands for Postmodern Mother-FILL IN BLANK YOURSELF and quite frankly is meant to be sort of derogatory).
So, whatever. If he'd rather sit at his computer and smirk at how delightfully ironic he is, he can be my guest. Just don't expect me to read any more of his works.
Apparently this book creates quite extreme reactions! Either you like it (I'm in that camp) or you hate it (It seems apparent that we could find Nikita here).
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to admit that you have a point Nikita. I didn't feel all that attached to the characters, except perhaps to Tateh, Mother and the little girl, even though they are relatively minor. And I could easily have read a more emotional book about those characters.
On the other hand, the fact that I know Doctorow is doing it on purpose, the fact that this book isn't meant to stir an emotional response to characters, makes me enjoy it more. It engages my brain and makes me wonder what Doctorow is doing. It makes me stare in awe at a paragraph of seamless dialogue that someone uses no quotation marks (did anyone else notice that?").
I guess it depends on whether or not you are okay with Doctorow refusing to engage in the normal practices of an author like making the characters seem real. I am, Nikita is not.
I agree that there is a kind of intellectual detachment throughout this novel, and to "enjoy" it means to enjoy engaging its ideas--about history, politics, aesthetics--rather than to develop an emotional engagement with the characters as "people." And this is a knock against much (but not all) postmodernist fiction--its lack of "heart," the sense, as Nikita so memorably describes, of the author sitting back smirking at the typewriter (or computer keyboard, or touchscreen), somewhere "above" it all. In a sense, Doctorow approaches his stories more as a historian than as a traditional novelist, and he wants to deliberately combat the idea that fiction engages our sentiment rather than (or more than) our intellect. As a teacher, I do "enjoy" this aspect--the stuff his novel leads us to talk about I generally like to talk about, and I think is *important* to talk about. But we're not in Thornfield Hall anymore, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteYou may have similar qualms about Reed and Vonnegut, but Butler (_Kindred_) might prove a refreshing change. We'll see.