11/14/2023 0 Comments Ragtime el doctorow review![]() He goes by boxcar rather than ship, as Loon Lake is set for the most part during the Depression. He's another Jay Gatsby or ishmael, named-change and all, that perennial willed orphan by which American fiction is so heavily populated, running away in search of his fate, an elusive woman, and America, which in this tradition are usually the same thing. In any case he's dismissed his working-class parents - poor, dispirited, "all dried up" - and is looking for better ones. The central character is a young man who calls himself Joe Paterson, because the name he inherited from his sad-sack, hunky father is unpronounceable. It's also no accident that one of thecentral motifs of Loon Lake is the fascination of success for those who aren't successful and the corrosive, dehumanizing effects of it on those who are. That Doctorow's verbal acrobatics by no means exclude involvement suggest that the line between "literature" and "entertainment" is one drawn by publishers rather than writers. It's a sad commentary on the state of publishing as well, that if it weren't by the author of Ragtime most commercial publishers would have rejected it as too literary. It's no accident, in other words, that Loon Lake would be regarded as "experimental" if it weren't by the author of Ragtime. It's no accident that Loon Lake has odd punctuation, excerpts of freeish verse written by one of the characters and passages jumpcut so that the reader has to figure out who's talking and what the time frame is. Doctorow is not one to shirk it: You can almost hear the gritting of his teeth as he charges it head-on. It's one of the facts of life and writing in America today, and it's demoralized more than one good writer. You've walked Niagara Falls on a tightrope once, but can you do it again? Does 220,000 hardback copies really mean you're a schlock artist? Then there are all those critics gunning from the shrubberies. Post-romantic inverse snobbery attached to sales figures is still with us. But success on the Ragtime scale in America almost automatically makes it more difficult for a writer to take himself seriously, partly because other, less successful writers begin to discount him. ![]() Everything about Doctorow's career to date indicates that he considers the novel a vehicle for social and moral commentary as well as an art form which should stretch the author's resources to their limits. A writer who is more serious must risk or perish. ![]() Doctorow when a novel such as Ragtime sells 220,000 copies in hardback, gets translated into 20 languages, and wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction? A writer of a certain kind would merely try to duplicate these lush results as quickly as possible. By Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood's latest novel is Life Before Man her TwoHeaded Poems will be published next year. ![]()
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