World's Fair
by E. L. Doctorow
Summary
Edgar is a small boy in the Bronx of the 1930s, and the novel is his childhood told from inside: the apartment on Eastburn Avenue, the older brother Donald, the beautiful anxious mother Rose, the charming father Dave whose music shop is failing in ways a child registers as weather, before he understands them as character.
Doctorow builds it deliberately as memoir rather than plot: the Great Depression arriving as smaller birthday presents and raised voices, street games, the fear of certain corners, a grandmother muttering in Yiddish, the radio's serials and war news, and history occasionally walking directly through the sky, as when Edgar looks up and watches the Hindenburg pass over the Bronx on the way to its fire. Interleaved, in a quiet formal touch, are testimonies from Rose and Donald, the family's other survivors giving their versions like witnesses in an oral history, gently correcting the boy's account and dating everything with grief that comes later.
The last movement belongs to the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. Edgar wins a trip by entering an essay contest on the Typical American Boy, and takes his family; the Fair's World of Tomorrow, all white highways and promises, closes the book on a perfectly balanced irony, the gleaming future exhibited to a boy the reader knows is standing at the edge of the war.
Around two hundred and ninety pages, warm, exact and unhurried.
Best for readers who want the American thirties at child height, from the most graceful of the era's reconstructors.
Historical Context & Significance
World's Fair won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and it was E. L. Doctorow's most openly personal book: the novelist was born Edgar, in the Bronx, in 1931, to a father who ran a music shop, and he called it the illusion of a memoir. Coming from the writer who had built Ragtime out of other people's history, the self portrait read as a key to the whole shelf: the historical novels and this private one share the same project, the past recovered as lived texture rather than costume.
Reviewers treated it as among his finest, Kirkus and others noting how completely it avoided nostalgia's syrup while trafficking entirely in its materials.
Doctorow's standing only grew afterwards, Billy Bathgate and The March collecting further prizes, and by his death in 2015 he was the acknowledged master of the American historical novel; this quiet book remains the one where the historian and the subject were the same boy.