Tales of the Bronx
KAPP, ISA
Tales of the Bronx World's Fair By E.L. Doctorow Random House. 288 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Isa Kapp E. L. Doctorow has always had a considerable and mystifying talent for persuading critics that...
...It is one of those impersonal crowd experiences that the author is especially at home with, and does well, but leaves me absolutely indifferent...
...Building characters has never been his strong suit, so members of the cast often slide by on a single mannerism or trait: an attractive woman will wink at Edgar good-naturedly...
...He admires her metaphors...
...Somewhat in the manner of comedian Victor Borge at the piano, he tinkered about, cutting out a snippet for use here, borrowing a tune there, blending old prejudices into new shapes, and smugly serving up the outlandish pastiche to his audience...
...Why are these admittedly potent episodes almost literally repeated...
...his paternal grandmother will make a spiteful remark about her daughter-in-law's extravagance...
...He has managed to convey a small boy's uneasy sense of the conflict between parents he adores, who are affectionate to him and each other, yet unalterably opposed in temperament, separate in their satisfactions...
...and after his grandmother (who spoke Yiddish and lit candles for her dead husband) dies, he comments oddly, "I had the distinct impression that death was Jewish...
...Certainly, Doctorow is writing "like a human being" in World'sFair...
...Doctorow can go on forever about the igloo built in his backyard or the technicalities of a coal truck delivery...
...In part, the small-scale solipsism is an advantage...
...Even when he reverts to his former obligation to sketch in historical vibrations, Doctorow settles for a child's view...
...Patience wearing thin was very fine...
...Profligate with such details as the physical effect of electrocution, it bypasses entirely the question of moral delinquency on the part of the defendants or an examination of the fellow-traveling mentality that could not admit Soviet atrocity for fear of losing complacency in its own familiar political judgments...
...The publishers, apparently loath to make him face the truth at this late date, have let him pretend that he has written another novel...
...A change in family fortunes or a move to a cheaper apartment, for example, is so clearly a j olt to his vulnerable young self that there is no need for sentimental embellishment...
...he was partial to a tan cardigan...
...by sheer incremental persistence, he conjures up that lost chunk of Jewish family life from decades ago...
...He roams the valley of Webster Avenue, thestoreson 174th Street, the Tremont library—before he was 10, the protagonist was already a veteran walker in the city...
...Partly, I suppose, because imagination, along with character, plot and idea, the necessary components of serious fiction, are in short supply for Doctorow...
...Until very recently, this writer has felt that rather than pursue either to its logical conclusion, he could use one to provide what he lacked in the other...
...He does not waste time daydreaming when he is doing his homework...
...My grandfather had a wonderful way of paring an apple, with his own pocketknife, so that the peel came off in one continuous strip...
...Nevertheless, tangibles still very much preoccupy him—foods he liked, exhibits he went to at the World's Fair, streets he traversed in the West Bronx, the local transit routes he delineates with the zeal of a cartographer...
...Reviewed by Isa Kapp E. L. Doctorow has always had a considerable and mystifying talent for persuading critics that his works are inventions...
...The burden of proof is further lightened by omitting almost any mention of the trial proceedings or the evidence as to guilt or innocence...
...It is curious that the only Doctorow story the reader can participate in emotionally is the real one of the Rosenbergs...
...The identical grandmother who pleases Edgar when she gives him a few pennies and frightens him when she intermittently believes her food is being poisoned appeared in The Book of Daniel...
...Doctorow keeps returning tothejauntyimage of his father, restless, full of surprises, reciting puns and limericks, happy in his Manhattan radio and record store till late at night...
...To journey up the broad Grand Concourse with my father was to be somehow in the proper rhythm of the day, like everyone else...
...On the other hand, I did enjoy the prize essay Edgar sent to the World's Fair contest on the subject of "The Typical American Boy," though I don't believe for a minute that he could have written it: "The typical American boy is not fearful of Dangers...
...In such plain, matter-of-fact, Yiddish-inflected prose, Doctorow records everyday occurrences...
...Whether plumping up pillows or striding through the chaos of Klein's department store in search of bargains, she seems magnificent to him...
...So did the scene of the boy seeing a car crash into a mother in the schoolyard of PS 70 and knock her to death two stories below...
...For the first time in his career, Doc-torow is being attentive to psychological fluctuation and creating a substantial person...
...In women he appreciates them all...
...He loved to be going somewhere.' Also authentic is the figure of brother Donald, seven years Edgar's senior, efficient, protective, a model of normality...
...he gets his first job and the hero, left to his own devices, turns with a vengeance to radio serials like The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger...
...Since both books are, despite broad hints of ominous social undercurrents, essentially frivolous, the author's arbitrary tactics and sententious glosses are of relatively small consequence...
...to deepen, not slant according to his needs, our understanding of the accused couple and the issues they were involved in...
...Yet here again, in keeping with his usual method, facts masquerade as fiction and fiction masquerades as fact...
...But the touch of the immediate family is strong and unmistakable, and for once, true to the Jewish middle-class experience, family is not synonymous with perversion, cruelty or violence...
...He cheered up, too, outside the house...
...In Loon Lake, which reads like a loony Marxist pamphlet on class conflict, camouflaged by layers of instant dreamwhip lyricism, the narrator (according to his creator) "throws his voice, and the reader has to figure out who and what he is," an unprofitable enterprise...
...Her stories dazzled me...
...He should be able to go out into the country and drink raw milk...
...A little later she would say, 'If you don't walk like a human being, I'm going to knock the spots out of you.' That was good too, although I never quite understood the etymology of it...
...Then, illogic-ally, recalling how his grandmother treated her asthma with marijuana, he speaks with the hindsight of a 54-year-old writer: "But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shtetl, a backfired life full of fume and sparks like a Fourth of July held in an open grave and projecting on the night a skull's leer and a clap of crossed bones...
...I'm sure many will be quoting his lengthy descriptions of the General Motors Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair...
...One indulgence of the adult world Doctorow cannot forgo is rhetorical blowup...
...Perhaps more distressingly, because of a particular attribute of this writer: capricious selection...
...Genuinely novelistic as well is the recollection of his stoical but intimate friendship with his schoolmate Meg, from ages seven to 10, and her mother Norma, more easygoing and natural than the women he was used to, and therefore viewed disapprovingly by his own mother...
...now has been torpedoed...
...In his new book, however, a less pretentious Doctorow than we are accustomed to has finally undertaken a subject he is equipped to handle: his autobiography from ages four to 10...
...Instead, the story of the fictional Isaacsons is narrated by their son, making the account as far from objective as it could possibly be...
...Their theme was vigilance...
...E. L. was probably a smooth operator by the time he was 10...
...Rosoff, the drugstore owner...
...And prosaic and literal though World's Fair is (using the Doctorows' actual first names), the author's dogged faithfulness to his 1930s childhood in the West Bronx turns it into his best effort so far...
...This memoir of the passive, dreamy Edgar is punctuated by the stages of Donald's life—he forms a swing band and the kid brother learns "Deep Purple" by heart...
...Helooks death in the face...
...AboulRagtime, asilvery cavalcade of picturesque public figures like Houdini, Emma Goldman and J.P Morgan, he confided that he "wanted to create something not as intimate as fiction nor as remote as history," a dubious ambition...
...Heknowsthe valueofadollar...
...He cooperates with his parents...
...Their purpose was instruction...
...Edgar hears whispers of frightening events in Germany...
...If he is Jewish he should say so...
...Doctorow is under the impression that "the convention of the consistent, identifiable narrative...
...Of the people in one of New York's loveliest and liveliest neighborhoods, whose Claremont Park was humming with political discussion, brilliant teenagers and energetic, gossipy women—a fascinating brew of high-pitched middle-class Jewry—Doctorow seems to remember only Mr...
...On second thought, why not...
...But the star Edgar is endlessly gazing at, that looms up in World's Fair like an artist's model, captured in every pose and light, is his mother, who "ran our home and our lives with a kind of tactless administration that often left a child with bruised feelings, though an indelible sense of right and wrong...
...But The Book of Daniel, dealing with an actual event as disturbing and complicated as the 1951 spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviets, should have impelled him to become more systematic and, above all, honest...
...I never quite know why certain occurrences or images recommend themselves to him, why he dwells on some events, like the zeppelin Hindenburg looming over Bronx housetops before it expired in New Jersey...
...He is kind...
...To a reader like myself, who lived a block away on the Grand Concourse and had two "best friends" on Eastburn Avenue where the hero of World's Fair lived, this passion for the concrete can be exasperating...
...Eden A venue (10 cents), the see-through blouse worn by his mother's friend, Mae—a kaleidoscope of images has affixed itself to Doctorow's prodigious memory...
...he liked me to press my palm against his to measure our hands...
...His grandmother's highlaced black shoes, the baked potato he ate for lunch, the price of admission to the Surrey Theater on Mt...
...Choosing to write about the very early years was calculated to limit his scope, stopping him circumspectly before the age of intellectual risk...
Vol. 68 • December 1985 • No. 16
