World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow

First published: 1985

Type of plot: Autobiographical

Time of work: The early 1930’s to 1940

Locale: New York City, mostly in the Bronx

Principal Characters:

• Edgar Altschuler, the protagonist, younger son of a Jewish family living in the Bronx
• Donald Altschuler, Edgar’s brother, who becomes a musician and signal corpsman
• Dave Altschuler, Edgar’s father, a failing businessman and a freethinker
• Rose Altschuler, Edgar’s mother, who is both practical and religious
• Meg, a classmate to whom Edgar is devoted

The Novel

World’s Fair begins with the earliest memories of Edgar Altschuler and concludes when he is nine years old with two visits to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. Edgar is the first-person narrator of thirty-one chapters, but his retrospective point of view merges the naïve impressions of a child with the more perceptive reflections of an adult. Four brief sections narrated by Rose, two sections narrated by Donald, and one section narrated by Edgar’s Aunt Frances supplement Edgar’s egocentric version of the family history. By making the street address and first names of the fictional Altschulers coincide with the actual address and names of his own family, Doctorow suggests that Edgar’s story of growing up is a thinly disguised account of his own boyhood.

Presented as a memoir, this novel has a loose, episodic plot. First, Rose establishes a foundation for Edgar’s narrative with brief comments about her parents’ emigration from Russia and her own birth on the Lower East Side. Then Edgar describes his horror upon awaking in a urine-soaked crib and the subsequent comfort of being dried and transported to his parents’ warm bed. Amid such scenes of parental protection, Edgar also recalls episodes fraught with fear and mystery. A car almost kills his dog Pinky, and thugs from nearby Italian and Irish neighborhoods draw swastikas on the family’s garage doors.

As Edgar’s horizons expand, he observes tensions in the extended family during Sunday visits to Dave’s parents and at a Seder meal. He also overhears his parents argue about Dave’s business mistakes, his gambling, and his alleged infidelities. On a trip to Far Rockaway beach, Edgar discovers discarded condoms, but no one will clarify for him their mysterious purpose. Edgar’s grandmother becomes senile and warns of cholera epidemics and attacks by the Cossacks. If these threats are exaggerated, Nazi atrocities in Europe (discussed by adults in hushed tones or in a language foreign to Edgar) are all too real. Later, Edgar discovers his grandmother dead in her own bed, and this death motivates Rose’s transition from secular to observant Jew.

At school, Edgar must mediate between two extremes of his personality—docile, attentive student in the classroom and hyperactive hellion on the playground. Throughout such trials, Donald is usually a patient and trustworthy guide. Nevertheless, Donald cannot protect his younger brother from terrible hints of mortality—the near drowning of a classmate, a fatal automobile accident that spills over onto the school playground, the crash of the Hindenburg. For several weeks Edgar is himself near death when his appendix bursts and he suffers peritonitis.

After Dave’s business fails and Donald leaves home to train as a civilian signal corpsman, the remaining Altschulers move to a much smaller apartment. In spite of the family’s financial reverses, Edgar does realize his dream of visiting the World’s Fair. He goes first as the guest of Meg, a classmate who has been the object of his affection since first grade. Meg’s mother is a kind but unconventional woman who works in the Fair’s Amusement Zone. Here she must wrestle with Oscar the Amorous Octopus and allow him to remove her bathing suit. After watching this underwater burlesque, Edgar is both shocked and gratified that he has finally learned some crucial secret of life. Edgar goes to the fair a second time as a winner of an essay contest in which he describes the typical American boy. Accompanied this time by his family, Edgar visits several exhibits displaying a utopian vision of the future, but he notices peeling paint and other signs of decay in pavilions that will soon be demolished. He is impressed by the time capsule at the fair, and his final act in the novel is to bury his own capsule in Claremont Park. As emblems of his nine years of life, he includes such items as a Tom Mix decoder badge, his handwritten biography of Franklin Roosevelt, a harmonica, a book on self-taught ventriloquism, and one of his mother’s torn stockings.

The Characters

Since Edgar is the first-person narrator for most of this novel, he naturally becomes the most fully developed character. This point of view permits full revelation of Edgar’s thoughts and feelings, but it constrains and sometimes distorts the presentation of other characters. As a child Edgar, acts only within a small realm, and his knowledge is sorely limited. Thus, his narrative cannot easily follow other family members into the larger world and interpret their actions soundly. In one of the seven sections of the novel not seen through Edgar’s eyes, Donald observes, “It’s only natural that we remember things differently.” Those sections narrated by Donald, Rose, and Aunt Frances do correct and amplify Edgar’s story, but they are not long enough (only twenty-eight pages) to provide full development of other characters.

Edgar’s central role as narrator is entirely appropriate, however, for a novel focusing on growth from infancy to the brink of adolescence. At the age of nine, Edgar does not complete his rite of passage into maturity, but he has encountered episodes of senseless violence, sudden death, mature sexuality, and the fallibility of adult protectors. Such experiences bring partial but painful knowledge, and Edgar gradually develops from naïve pre-schooler to more perceptive student of life. Even if he remains somewhat callow, his responses thus far predict further progress in maturation and illumination.

Throughout much of the novel, Donald is the stock big-brother protector and adviser. He is a good athlete, conscientious student, and responsible part-time worker in his father’s music store. When Donald gets a summer job as a musician at a resort hotel and becomes involved with girls, his story becomes more intriguing, but readers learn of these experiences away from home only through one letter and the sketchy report of a neighbor who visited the hotel. Later, Donald flunks out of college, but the reasons and his reactions are not fully explained because they are largely tangential to Edgar’s story.

Dave and Rose display conflicting traits. While he is impulsive, impractical, and irreligious, she is disciplined, orderly, and active in the sisterhood of the synagogue. Edgar reports frequent disagreements between the two, but, like Edgar, the reader never gets confirmation of many allegations. The four sections narrated by Rose all come early in the book (when the mother is naturally the most important character in a small child’s life). Later, her unhappiness is apparent but never closely examined.

Meg and, especially, her mother Norma offer startling contrasts to Edgar’s staid and respectable world. The daughter of an exotic dancer, Meg is quiet but self-assured. She arouses Edgar’s juvenile affection and becomes his closest confidante. Norma provokes Rose’s disapproval. Her behavior sometimes surprises Edgar, but it always reflects kindness and simple wisdom.

Critical Context

Winner of the National Book Award in 1986, World’s Fair is Doctorow’s sixth novel. Most of his novels, such as Ragtime (1975) and The Waterworks (1994), re-create earlier historical periods and use actual or fictional events from the past to make social and political commentary. In Welcome to Hard Times (1960), for example, nineteenth century settlers on the Western frontier cannot escape evils of the East embodied in the Bad Man from Bodie. The Book of Daniel (1971) questions the workings of the American legal system by focusing on the trial and punishment of two characters much like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

World’s Fair is one of several Doctorow novels set in Depression-era America. In Loon Lake (1980) a poor drifter falls into the strange world of an eccentric millionaire and emerges as that tycoon’s corrupt adopted son. The events of Billy Bathgate (1989), chronicling Billy’s apprenticeship to the gangster Dutch Schultz, are much more overtly criminal.

Doctorow has acknowledged autobiographical elements in World’s Fair and labelled it an “illusion of a memoir.” As such, it deftly maintains a dual focus. It is a rich documentary of life in a Bronx community during the 1930’s, with occasional glances outward at America’s economic disruption and Nazi tyranny in Europe. At the same time, it is a highly individual account of personal and artistic development. The novel offers a detailed picture of another era, intriguing glimpses of Doctorow’s life and thought, and a timeless story of tentative initiation.

Bibliography

The Atlantic. CCLVI, December, 1985, p. 119.

Booklist. LXXXII, September 15, 1985, p. 90.

Cosmopolitan. CXCIX, November, 1985, p. 66.

Esquire. CIV, November, 1985, p. 25.

Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. A useful introduction to Doctorow’s themes and techniques.

Glamour. LXXXIII, December, 1985, p. 192.

Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. E. L. Doctorow. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Straightforward biocritical survey of Doctorow’s work, with useful bibliography and chronology.

Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Methuen, 1985. Concise analysis of Doctorow’s short stories and the five novels prior to World’s Fair, with particular emphasis on his revision of history.

Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. A theoretical study of the problems of fictional representation based on ideas of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller. Suggested for more advanced students.

Nation. CCXLI, November 30, 1985, p. 594.

The New York Review of Books. XXXII, December 19, 1985, p. 23.

The New York Times Book Review. XC, November 10, 1985, p. 3.

Newsweek. CVI, November 4, 1985, p. 69.

Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Continuum, 1991. Perceptive commentary on Doctorow’s novels and the play Drinks Before Dinner (1979), with particular attention to important social and political forces in American history.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, September 13, 1985, p. 124.

Time. CXXVI, November 18, 1985, p. 100.

Vogue. CLXXV, November, 1985, p. 286.