2010 Reading #12: Ragtime
Feb. 5th, 2010 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snurriBooks 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. This is one of those novels that is excellent in ways that are difficult to articulate. It has odd rhythms. The sentences are straightforward, declarative, staccato, and yet as they pile together they begin to feel like dream images. Ragtime has elements of alternate history--figures like Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, and Emma Goldman appear in situations that never really happened--but it feels more like a dream of the United States before The Change. The Change could be more than one thing--World War I, the rise of the Labor Movement, the rise of Hollywood; it's all those things and none of them. Doctorow isn't as interested in the historical mechanics of the change as he is in its repercussions. He's writing, I think quite consciously, about a world that is lost to us, and it's not that he regrets its passing so much as that he wants to comprehend it, to encompass it somehow in his narrative sprawl. It is an extraordinarily good book.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. This is one of those novels that is excellent in ways that are difficult to articulate. It has odd rhythms. The sentences are straightforward, declarative, staccato, and yet as they pile together they begin to feel like dream images. Ragtime has elements of alternate history--figures like Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, and Emma Goldman appear in situations that never really happened--but it feels more like a dream of the United States before The Change. The Change could be more than one thing--World War I, the rise of the Labor Movement, the rise of Hollywood; it's all those things and none of them. Doctorow isn't as interested in the historical mechanics of the change as he is in its repercussions. He's writing, I think quite consciously, about a world that is lost to us, and it's not that he regrets its passing so much as that he wants to comprehend it, to encompass it somehow in his narrative sprawl. It is an extraordinarily good book.