Ragtime

 

Ragtime won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 and E. L. Doctorow continued to receive prestigious awards, up through the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2014. He had the acclaim most writers only dream of. 

What do I see when I look at the very narrow sliver of his work that is the first sentence of Ragtime?

We have a time, a place, and two people. We have strong implications of prestige. We have rhythm choices that echo the music named in the title. Let's take them one at a time. 

1902 is the named time. However, the narrator mentions that "Father built" then – which means we are looking back at 1902, with the house complete and the child of the builder grown enough to look back. We don't yet know how far into the past 1902 is. 

Similarly, we have two people – "Father" and the narrator – one observed, and one observing. 

Every word after "built" adds more dimension to the location. "A house" is broad enough to allow many different buildings. "At the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill" places the house on a commanding rise. Broadview Avenue suggests a wide and stately road. In most cities, the homes with the best views – and the ones displayed by rising on the heights – belong to wealthy citizens. I was not familiar with New Rochelle, New York – but the French ending "-elle" suggests refinement. A quick search shows that in 1902, families from New York were moving there to have more spacious homes. It was an early suburb, and, for people who lived in the area, that flavor of wealth and escape would resonate as reflexively as the knowledge of which are the wealthy areas of one's own town. 

"Father built a house" shows that he had the money and power to make his dwelling to his liking instead of buying someone else's design. Compare this to "Dad bought a home." Doctorow's version is cooler and more formal. Father is more distant than Dad and house is less loving than home. 

Doctorow doesn't need to say "my father was a wealthy man." The details show it. And then we wonder, how does the narrator relate to that father, and what has happened since 1902? The motion of the story begins subtly and slowly. 

Two parts of the rhythm particularly grab my interest. First, I would have put a comma after "1902." Doctorow is adept enough to have put one if he wanted it. Without it, the sentence has less of a break there, and the words roll together until the only comma, after "Rochelle." So we have one long string until "New Rochelle, New York." Prepared by the title of the book, I hear the final two words, "New York," as the final two notes in the iconic phrase of Scott Joplin's ragtime hit, "The Entertainer." The long stretch of words followed by the quick two syllables reflects the rhythm of one of the most likely songs to come to mind when someone hears the word "ragtime." What fun! Joplin wrote "The Entertainer" in 1902. 

Did Doctorow intend that connection? I'm unaware of him having said so, and without his statement, we can only infer his intent. Such puzzles are one of the pleasures of reading – and are also one aspect of more literary writing. Even this one sentence has clues to Doctorow's many awards. 

Thank you to Sasha Eileen Sutton for suggesting the sentence and to Ken Silbert for graphic design.