First impressions of "Ragtime"

With a few exceptions, I generally don't like to write off novels as inarguably "not good" because I don't think I'm qualified to make such an assertion—nor is anybody else really, since what is and isn't good is a totally subjective matter. So, I'm not going to say that Ragtime is not good. Rather, I will simply say that I struggle very greatly to understand how it can possibly be perceived by a sane human being as anything other than not good.

For one thing, I just don't like the writing style at all, which is sort of weird because I normally enjoy narrators that are a bit austere and detached. I loved Hemingway last semester, for example, but Doctorow's voice is not creating the same effect for me at all. While I felt like Hemingway's short sentences had a lot buried underneath them, Doctorow's just sound dull and list-like; they annoy me. Maybe it's partly due to the fact that Ragtime's also in third person, whereas The Sun Also Rises was told by a character I really liked, but either way, I'm having a very hard time getting into the narrative voice.

Beyond that, I'm also finding the plot pretty unilaterally infuriating. The only times I find myself actually getting into the story line is when I forget completely that I'm technically reading about real people—this happens mostly with Evelyn Nesbit, since I hadn't even heard of her until opening this book—and even then I often struggle to understand what Doctorow's point is. It irritates me mostly that he deliberately chooses to use historical figures, as opposed to plain old fictional characters, but then proceeds to use them in what seem to be largely random and meaningless ways.

I definitely don't think a good historical novel needs to be entirely accurate, but I have a hard time buying into Doctorow's story when he's so deliberate and over-the-top about those aspects of it that are inaccurate. I feel like he's just waving scenes in our face and trying to tease us with them in a, "Hey look what I can make these people do—I bet it'll weird you out," kind of way. So much of the novel strikes me as Doctorow simply flaunting the fact that he's the author and can bend history however he wants, rather than actually trying to make a point.

And you know, not everything has to have a point. Doctorow is perfectly right in thinking that he, as the author, can make his characters do anything in the word he wants, regardless of the fact that most of the people he's writing about have real-life identities too. I mean, if I were writing a historical novel, I'm sure I'd get a huge kick out of having one famous person make obscene gestures at another famous person through the bars in his jail cell too. However, just because I'd get a chuckle out of writing it doesn't mean anyone else in the world would find it as interesting to read.

So, it's not the fact that Doctorow seems to think himself pretty cool for being able to throw all these historical figures together in such absurd scenes that I have a problem with; honestly, all power to him if that's a favorite pastime of his. Rather, I'm just irked that he seems to expect people to read it and be equally enamored of his craftiness. I mean, if he's not even going to pretend like he's trying to write a convincing novel, then I don't see why I have to pretend like I think it's good.

However, just like I won't explicitly coin this a bad book, I also won't say that Ragtime legitimately has no point; to some people I'm sure it does. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people—not yet, anyway. At the moment, all I see in Ragtime is a compilation of absurd, random scenes mixed in with the occasional glimpse of humanity, with the former heavily outweighing the latter. But, hey. It's possible Doctorow will surprise me with a great ending that saves the whole story for me, so I suppose I won't jump to conclusions just yet.

(The uncomfortable thing, though, is that I just checked and apparently Doctorow is still alive. Normally books I read for class are written by dead people, which makes me feel totally guiltless in criticizing them—Charlotte Brontë, for instance, has been dead for more than 150 years, so I think it's safe to say she no longer has the ability to give a hoot what people think of Jane Eyre, which is excellent news for me. Now that I know Doctorow's alive, however, I feel like this blog entry just bullied an 81-year-old man, which is, by most standards, not cool. Oh well.)