Read about the Ragtime

I just finished the novel Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. It was great and you should read it too.

It is historical fiction that takes place in and around New York City at the start of the Twentieth Century. Much of the story follows three families and what they do to fulfill their dreams in America. In the book over half a dozen historical figures interact with the main characters without eclipsing them. The famous real people drive the thematic development without diverting the plot.

I was first exposed to the story in high school when I was involved with our school's musical production based upon the work in May 2003 (Oh no! the Unnamed Geniuses made a mistake). When the story was adapted for the stage a lot of material had to be cut out or reduced. However, this meant when I read the book a bunch of it was new to me.

I came to know the plot of Ragtime the same roundabout way I learned the plot of all the plays I worked on. I will explain.

Learning plot through play
Whenever I was on stage crew, I pieced the story of the play together slowly. Since my job was to build things and move stuff around, I was not given a script. As rehearsal started, I would hear about individual scenes. The stage manager would say we needed to make a graveyard scene or the director would talk about benches we needed for a classroom. This gave me an idea of the setting. When the cast appeared on stage to practice lines I learned more about the action. As the days advanced, I would see a couple of new scenes and some of the old ones incessantly repeated. I knew a few isolated parts very well, but lacked the context they were in. If it was a musical, the songs would haunt my waking and resting hours.

As I learned more about the characters, I still had no idea what the correct sequence of events was. More plot details would emerge from what I was told to do. Once the stage manager told me to build a window seat with an opening top so bodies could be hidden inside it. I had no idea why people died, only that they were hidden. Every time I pieced together a narrative that made sense to me, something would throw it into chaos. The stage manager would say we needed to bring a barrel in for the jail scene or the technical director said we needed to simulate a fire offstage. Since the storyline I had constructed had nothing to do with a jail and no room for a character to go to jail, these revelations would bring my understanding of the play back to square one. It was not until the first dress rehearsal that I saw all the scenes and figured out the correct order. After seeing the complete play I would realize I made a big mistake, like thinking the villain of the story was actually the hero.

Now back to the book. When I recently heard the novel was supposed to be a good work of literature I decided to pick it up. I was not disappointed; the book was great. Unlike some of my recent reading, every time I put the book down I looked forward to when I would continue it the next day.