EL Doctorow’s World’s Fair is a story of the past with its eyes on the future, the tale of an unremarkable Bronx schoolboy stumbling towards manhood. Tellingly, the book takes its title from a lavish 1939 event that set out to construct the world of tomorrow on the marshland of Flushing Meadows, New York. Some 15 years before, this same site had doubled as the blighted “Valley of Ashes” in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Today, it is home to the US Open tennis tournament, where singles champions pocket a $3.5m pay cheque. Implicitly and explicitly, Doctorow tells us that landscapes – like people – are subject to change and growth, collapse and renewal. The process can be difficult and is frequently knotted with problems. But such surging, forward motion is in and of itself hopeful.
The dustjacket of my battered hardback edition bills World’s Fair as “a novel” - a claim that’s almost as rich as the prose that follows. Doctorow’s hero, like him, is called Edgar. Like him, he had an elder brother called Donald. His mother and father were called Rose and Dave and they all lived in an apartment on Eastburn Avenue. The narrative amounts to a rush of memory. The plot is as vividly messy as life itself. So in what way is this a novel, exactly? It is as though, having poured his childhood out onto the page, the author was so alarmed by the portraits he’d painted and the confidences he’d betrayed that he made a last-ditch attempt to disguise the whole thing as fiction.
If so, I think his fears were groundless because World’s Fair looks back not with anger but with warmth and compassion. Doctorow was in his mid-50s when he wrote the book – old enough to know that human frailty is a given and that all families are imperfect. With the benefit of hindsight he can see that his charming dad was a feckless dreamer, losing money hand over fist, and that his mum was too harried and hard-bitten to wring much enjoyment from life. Still, he is reassured that they loved him and that he loved them right back. On balance, that’s probably the way with most families. When all the grudges and grievances wear down, what remains is the love.
As well as unpicking his own roots, however, Edgar is intent on devouring the world, making sense of its mysteries. He steps on to the street with his eyes out on stalks and his nostrils positively flaring. And all around him as he goes, the Bronx explodes in a flutter of comic-books and kosher butchers, pushcart vendors and street-corner radicals. Heroes come in the shape of FDR and Benny Goodman; villains in the shape of Adolf Hitler and the teenage hoodlums who vault across the backyard fences. To the sophisticated eye, the 1939 World’s Fair would seem the epitome of vulgarity with its brash exhibits (Gay New Orleans, Forbidden Tibet), calliope soundtrack and tacky sideshows (“Norma’s job was to wrestle with Oscar the Amorous Octopus in a tank of water”). Doctorow makes us see it as it ought to be seen – a fabulous, futuristic Oz, newly sprung at the end of the elevated railway.
Towards the end of World’s Fair, Edgar enters an essay-writing competition on the theme of the typical American boy. “The Typical American Boy is not fearful of Dangers,” he writes. “If he is Jewish he should say so. If he is anything he should say what it is when challenged.” In a more sappy coming-of-age story (a novel, let’s say) this effort would win first prize and its author be hailed as a literary star in the making. In the real world, though, magic takes softer, more subtle forms. So no, Edgar’s earnest, heartfelt essay can’t mend his parents’ failing marriage or save his dad’s floundering music shop. But it does earn honourable mention in the local paper. Indirectly it allows his mother and father to part as friends. Perhaps also indirectly, it announces the end of one story and the start of another.
Ever so gently, with no fanfare to speak of, the book’s final section shows owl-eyed Edgar taking his first steps from home. He has written and been noticed; he’s forging an independent life. And this, of course, is how it should be; it’s happening all over. One generation collapses into its valley of ashes. Another clambers up to take its place. And therefore, while World’s Fair is a specific recollection about a specific child in a specific time and place, I’ve always felt there’s something gorgeously, expansively universal about it too. Doctorow’s book is a salute to every runtish, unrecognised kid who (with a little help) learned how to write their name or ride a bike. They come wobbling out into the world on their own, outpacing their parents, in search of adventure.
