![]() ![]() The Fair inspired hope: like its sleek, modern buildings, America would rise out of stagnation and create a prosperous, carefree future. Despite the palliatives of the New Deal, recovery was not yet clearly in sight. The country was mired in the 10th year of the worst depression in its history. The Fair's inspirational symbolism was calculated and timely. What had been a swamp in Flushing, Long Island - "the valley of ashes" in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - suddenly became the World of Tomorrow. IT IS ABOVE ALL the 1939-1940 World's Fair itself that provides Doctorow with his most extended and resonant cluster of images. ![]() The symbolic point is obvious: the effort to soar above the jumble of the world leads to catastrophe. Several years later, in 1936, one of Edgar's most exalted moments occurs when he sees overhead the airship Hindenburg, silver and huge and mighty, tilted toward him "as if she was an enormous animal leaping from the sky in monumental slow motion." That same evening, while listening to The Answer Man and I Love a Mystery, Edgar hears the news bulletin that the Hindenburg has crashed at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Here is an emblem for the decay of childhood wonder, the transience of human achievement, and the futility of utopian dreams. After a week or two, it becomes dirty, misshapen, boring, and then it simply melts. At first, this is a mysterious, inviting habitat. When Edgar is 3, for example, his older brother builds an igloo in the backyard. He invents some of the episodes, while he borrows others - as in Ragtime and The Book of Daniel - from history. The history of the Depression and the slide into war becomes the education of a young boy, and the calamitous events of the 1930s are thereby rescued from familiarity and regain something of their outsize scale.ĭoctorow has always been stronger as a maker of separate scenes than as a storyteller, and the autobiographical technique of World's Fair enables him to offer a series of episodes that reveal his thematic purposes. Edgar is intended as a kind of emotional and moral perspective device, whose own innocence and transparency permit the facts he reports to speak powerfully for themselves. ![]() However, Doctorow's main purpose in creating a narrator of such extreme simplicity is not to evade history but to confront it more directly. World's Fair is Doctorow's fond portrait of the artist as a young man. In part, the nostalgic inventories that fill this novel derive from the biographical facts of the case: Doctorow shares a birth date and a first name with his main character, and his early years povide some of the story's material. Lists are not literature, and Doctorow relies rather too often on catalogues of brand names as a sentimental short-cut to the past. ![]() Thus, the Depression means primarily a sequence of ever-smaller houses into which Edgar and his family move. The global history of the '30s intrudes, but only as it becomes part of the boy's own experience. The main events in the novel are those that happen inside the family. The key to the novel's point of view lies in lines from Wordsworth that Doctorow quotes as his epigraph: "A raree-show is here,/ With children gathered round." Through Edgar's eyes, the 1930s become a raree-show, a world more of spectacle than politics. DOCTOROW's World's Fair is a story of growing-up, consisting almost entirely of Edgar Altschuler's recollections of his childhood in the Depression and told in a stripped down language that avoids bravura. ![]()
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