Reflections: Ragtime

Thirty-five years after its publication, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime still speaks to readers. It is on the list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die" and was voted one of Time Magazine's best 100 books of the 20th century. Its tale about the American era between the turn of the century and the nation's entry into WWI weaves together concerns and beliefs very much in the fore of American popular discourse today: immigration, capitalism, race relations, patriotism, the gap between the lifestyles of the very rich and the very poor. The scope feels broad, epic even. And for me, at least, this is the book's downfall. It reads like a writing exercise more than a novel, like Doctorow joined a microfiche exploration with a healthy imagination in search of a a plausible story. It only succeeds to a point, and the weakest sections are those least connected to the section of the story that gives the novel its title. In this strand, a black ragtime musician launches a life- unraveling spree of violence after becoming the victim of a vicious act of racism. This part of Doctorow's story, from start to finish, is fascinating, but it loses force of purpose from the penumbra of other stories that lead the reader to constantly try to connect one character to the next. While I try to discern the narrative importance of a luncheon shared by an investor and Henry Ford, the details that would radicalize a young man with a penchant for weapon design slip past, thus making the denouement hardly credible.

The novel begins with a murder: a wealthy sadist has killed the famous architect lover of his opportunistic wife. We are asked to care about this matter because: a> the sadist sees Houdini escape from a cell and later performs the same trick to free himself; b> the architect happened to design some of the buildings in which the action takes place--including the library of Pierpont Morgan; c> the wife, freed by a gunshot from both men with a claim to her finds herself at liberty to pick up with the younger brother of the family that will take in the illegitimate child of the ragtime musician. In the scope of the true core of the narrative, only the younger brother matters. Murder, wife, capitalist, sadistic husband, architect lover, and famous magician: all to no real end. This opening gambit displays the characteristic inefficiency that steers the novel.

Now, one could argue that to focus on plot and its necessary characters and scenes in such a concentrated manner is to take a very narrow view of the art of the novel and of Ragtime in particular. The appearances of Pierpont and Houdini, however tangential they might seem, paint the background of the extraordinary moment in American history in which the action unrolls. You have the great entrepreneurial spirit of Pierpont, with his unparalleled commercial success in all manner of capital ventures. His embarrassment of riches and lack of intellectual competition send him on a spiritual journey to fill his time and his desire for something to truly matter. Boo capitalism. Likewise Houdini seeks the extraordinary (like learning to fly a bi-plane) because these decades are rife with possibility, with arctic adventures and new inventions. But these stories are not presented as background information. In terms of space and depth, the stories of Pierpont and Houdini receive just as much attention as those of anyone else--including the ragtime musician, thus creating a Picasso-esque distortion of perspective.

In short, the novel seems to lack a core, both of focus and of point of view. And while we may take pleasure in the snappy dialogue of Emma Goldman or the plucky spirit of the system-bucking immigrant Tateh, the value of Ragtime as a whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

Reflections: The Help

There is something about Kathryn Stockett's The Help. This novel about the entanglement of racism and the expectations for cultured white women in the American South circa the mid twentieth-century has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 62 weeks and counting. One cannot avoid an at least osmotic awareness of the title as it pops up so frequently in conversation and in the hands of strap-hangars.

Readers find Stockett's story attractive for its easy narrative style. Events are told from different perspectives as is needful in a segregated society, each side filling in details missed or differently experienced.  The physically awkward and intellectually ambitious Ms. Skeeter Phelan fills the heroine role. She is a white woman raised by a black nurse who risks her social status to write the untold story of the black domestics who work for the women in her town. She is easy for the modern, liberal reader to identify with as she seems the only white character to have anything like an identifiable relationship to the extent of the problems caused by the oppression of an entire segment of the population. Perhaps identification is too easy; Skeeter and her subjects only flirt with the real dangers posed by the civil rights movement--dangers barely engaged with by the book--thereby allowing the real circumstances experienced by black Americans and their active sympathizers to be rendered aesthetic and anodyne. Those concerns aside, there is no denying that Skeeter is a compelling character, fully realized and lovable. She is more than just a Junior League crusader: she is a devoted but put upon daughter, a reader, a woman recognizing the gap education can create between a young adult's past and future associates.

The other main voices of the novel are two domestics, Minnie and Aibileen. Each feels the injustice of circumstances, and each embodies a different response to it. Minnie gets her licks where she can, refusing to tolerate anything beyond a defined baseline of humiliation from her white employers. Pushed, she verbally lashes out, which often ends in her termination and leads to more violent than average beatings from her alcoholic husband. Her saving grace on the job market is her extraordinary culinary ability. Minnie's friend Aibileen responds to the entrenched habits of a racist town and country more meekly, believing that adults who've been raised to see a qualitative difference between black and white will never see beyond those divisions. Her tack is to influence her employer's children, teaching them that skin color provides little in the way of character insight. The stories of Minnie and Aibileen, like that of Skeeter, succeed at gripping the reader. They are told in dialect--a risky move for Stockett and one that initially raised my politically correct hackles--but that does nothing but communicate the shifted perspective and remind the reader how distinct the cultures of the black and white members of the area have become because of their historical separation.

Stockett's novel succeeds, undeniably, as a fiction. It tells a gripping story that the willing reader falls into, creating a believable world of interpersonal relationships and avoiding some of the most obvious pitfalls of writing on the tender subject of race in America. For all that, I find myself repulsed by it, and it took me several weeks after finishing to locate where that feeling came from and to what degree it was just. What I found was that Stockett's narrative impulses work at counter purpose to Skeeter's own project. Skeeter wants to humanize a group of women who have been dehumanized in the eyes of the establishment. In order to get their story heard, Sheeter and the maids risk their personal safety, and require some kind of protection to prevent the piece from being traced back to them. It will be published anonymously, of course, but with all the details of domestic circumstances that rise to the surface in detailing daily lives, they might be exposed. To prevent this eventuality, the women include in the text an act of humiliation perpetrated by Minnie on the president of the Junior League and the leader of town opinion, one Miss Hilly. The act itself is bestial, cruel, and disgusting all at once. In other words, it dehumanizes Minnie, destroying with one swipe all the sympathy built up around her and her plight over the previous pages. That this is what Stockett comes up with to keep the story rolling leaves this reader, at least, with a very bad taste in her mouth.

Reflections: The Learners

I was recently reminded just how many ways there are to enjoy fiction. I am a person who holds strong beliefs about what makes a novel a pleasant and worthwhile read. Judged by my code, Chip Kidd's The Learners would not have been at the top of the class. And yet.

I have rarely laughed so hard and so loud in my adult life--and in public too. No social inhibitions could forestall the audible glee of consuming the verbal set pieces and well-written, in-character word play which spill off these pages. To give you just a taste, here is a conversation that introduces to the reader a washed out senior copywriter with whom the narrator works at a New Haven advertising agency:

"Sketch, in a private moment once at Saluzo's after work and feeling a couple thrown back, was..succinct: 'I've always thought of him as a well-wiped asshole.' I had to agree--he certainly was hygienic. Whatever the shambles of his life, there wasn't a hair out of place. Tip even claimed he once caught him in the men's room of the Quinnipiac Club combing his head with a salad fork after a high wind on the croquet lawn blew his comb over to the wrong side. Square of jaw and high of forehead, he looked like an amalgam of Dag Hammarskjold and an Easter Island monolith" (43).

The use of the word 'asshole' as a visual rather than characterological descriptor strikes me as genius. We don't do that. Once the reader had conquered this first dissonance, she must then immediately face another: now that we've turned insult to image, our mental picture must be unmoored from its standard associations--waste, dirtiness. In its place we are asked to understand the clean asshole as somehow cleaner than, say, a freshly cleaned suit.The narrator insists that you follow his lead in morphing the signified, but then, to reward you for good work, he leaves you to the enjoyment of an uncomplicated slapstick moment. We recline on this juvenile humor just long enough to remind ourselves how the pleasure is only superficial and then, wham, to a brain teasing (and absurd) mental image that requires good historical memory (or access to research resources); the Swedish diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize recipient collides with Moai. It's like a hip hop class for your brain.

The above is a small sample of the level of vivid and cheeky description that simultaneously conveys what something looks like and how the narrator feels about it. Perhaps the most artful aspect of this style is its inconsistency: if the whole novel read like this the individual gems would be lost without contrast among their peers. Kidd husbands his comic moments so that each one really zings.

And yet. The novel does leave something to desire; it could almost be described by that great insult of cruisers everywhere: all show, no go. The plot is minimal, the angst that should inhabit that plot somehow mismanaged, and there are ineffective meta-literary insertions that don't add much to the experience--although the last one really carries a significant narrative burden. The Learners has a privileged place on the shelf notwithstanding. Call it beach reading for the unself-consciously geeky.