Read Slower

I’m reading Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow.

I won’t go into how Ragtime is different from other novels in its delivery or subject-matter, and I won’t detail the sudden and unexpected raunchy moments. But while reading a couple of pages today, I twice stopped to appreciate the writing.

1. Harry Houdini (yes, the escape artist) is walking through a hospital.

“Chutes of cheerful morning sun leaned like buttresses from the high dirty windows of the ward.”

Reading that this morning, in my hurry to get to what happened next, I had mentally translated the sentence into, “sun came in the windows.” Luckily, I caught myself. Slow down. Picture it.

He didn’t say that the sun came in. Or even that chutes of sun came in. The chutes of sun leaned like buttresses. I can see that in my mind. And they didn’t just lean through any old windows, but through the high dirty windows of the ward. And there’s more.

The chutes weren’t just of sun, but of “cheerful morning sun.” Nice.

That little sentence, dense with information, paints a remarkably clear picture of the scene, but only as long as the reader is present enough to appreciate it. I may never be a great writer, but at least I can aim to be a good reader.

2. Doctorow uses an obscure word, without defining it. “Versts.”

What is a verst? I looked it up in Merriam-Webster’s unabridged: “a Russian unit of distance equal to 500 sagenes or 0.6629 miles.” How can he use an impossible word like that and expect anyone to follow what he’s saying? It’s ridiculous.

But here’s the context:

An immigrant to the U.S. (from Eastern Europe) is traveling by train. As he looks out the window, he begins to remember the old country:

“He saw the village of his youth going by now, some versts beyond the meadow.”

“Versts” is the perfect word here. Yeah, I had to look it up, but no other word would have worked as well. The character thinks about home, and at home, he didn’t think in miles. It’s exactly right.

As I mentioned, the book is called Ragtime; on its opening page Doctorow quotes Scott Joplin:

“Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.”