RAGTIME

Doctorow does a fairly nice job reading his justly celebrated portrait of 1906 America. He has a sandy, pleasant, lightly accented voice and a fine sense of the dramatic--though he strangely mispronounces words, as, for instance, "lau-DEN-um" instead of "LAU-de-num." Neither has he the comic touch as a performer to match his comic touch as a writer. More importantly, this tape suffers from the same inevitable flaw of the film and musical versions. They cannot reproduce the original's principal achievement: the stunning conjuration of ragtime music. To hear that, one must read the book silently to oneself. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 98]