Time Capsule
Doctorow, E.L.
BOOKS Time Capsule WORLD'S FAIR by E.L. Doctorow Random House. 258 pp. $17.95. Novelist E(dgar) L(awrence) Doctorow likes to mention that he was named after Edgar Allan Poe. He doesn't usually...
...Like all important works of art...
...As Doctorow has also noted, the book itself is a time capsule...
...Doctorow's World's Fair moves from personal to universal insights, constantly recreating events and ideas he couldn't possibly have literally recalled from his childhood...
...He begins with a brief section from Edgar's mother that explains something of the family's European background...
...Young Edgar displays a magical marshalling of objects and activities which clearly foreshadow the work materials of a writer...
...They were never at peace...
...It is perhaps not a book for everyone...
...He doesn't usually discuss his middle name, but it may have been the source of his penchant for using initials, perhaps after D(avid) H(erbert) or T(homas) E(dward) Lawrence...
...Doctorow may come from the German-Yiddish word dichter, which means author or poet...
...On the contrary, although his father was clearly unreliable, he was fun: "He was a child's ideal companion, full of surprises and animal energy...
...As in his other novels, Doctorow centers on an American family, this one called Altschuler—the name means Old Scholar, or perhaps a student of old times...
...Then most of the narrative comes from Edgar himself, with occasional asides from his brother and an aunt but, significantly, none from his father...
...I doubt that the underwater nudie show in which Meg's mother took part actually existed...
...And indeed Doctorow has engaged in a prodigious effort to research the details of life in the 1930s, concluding in 1939-1940 with the World's Fair in Flushing, Long Island...
...His commentary includes games like stoop ball, punch ball and stickball, slug, and hit the stick...
...Having grown up in Brooklyn around the same time, I was amazed at how many details could be dredged up...
...Their differences created a kind of magnetic field for me in which I swung this way or that according to the direction of the current...
...It includes a Tom Mix decoder badge, his short essay on the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Marine Band harmonica, his mother's torn silk stocking, and some other artifacts...
...He remembers his first punchboard, his first scumbag on the beach, Melorols, a coal truck dumping its load on the sidewalk, trips to the "country," excursions all the way to the beach in Far Rockaway, and a first experience with anti-Semitism...
...Here as elsewhere, there are lots of fictions in this lovely and quietly passionate work...
...Who can remember that the narration in the Perisphere was by H. V. Kaltenborn or that the music for that exhibit was by the black composer William Grant Still...
...But that is to underestimate Doctorow's skill and miss the carefully wrought strategies that support this brilliant reconstruction of the life and mind of a young boy's first ten years in the Bronx...
...Things change so quickly in America, he feels, that they will be lost forever if the writer does not salvage them...
...Not that Edgar rejects his father...
...They were a marriage of two irreducibly opposed natures...
...Under the influence of the Fair's time capsule, which is intended to acquaint finders five thousand years hence with the outlines of our civilization, Edgar buries his own version in Claremont Park...
...he essentially shows the human solidarity of two children before the world imposes its skewed values...
...Underlying the plot is the constant bickering of Edgar's mother and father: "The conflict between my parents was probably the major chronic circumstance of my life...
...There are several superb moments of incipient sexuality in the play of Edgar and his first real friend, Meg...
...I bristled at his comment that Brooklyn was a foreign country—this was exactly what we used to say about the Bronx...
...The names are of some interest since the main characters in World's Fair are a young boy named Edgar, his older brother, and his parents, named Dave and Rose...
...If you grew up elsewhere they may leave you cold or, on the other hand, you may be fascinated by Doctorow's almost compulsive memorization...
...a free soul tethered, by a generous improvidence not terribly or shrewdly mindful of itself, to the imperial soul of an attractive woman...
...If you're not interested in the culture of cities, you may not be moved...
...Since the last two are the real names of Doctorow's parents, many reviewers object to the subtitle, A Novel, and insist that the book is a memoir or autobiography and not fiction at all...
...Doctorow's strategy to accomplish this is a carefully managed and controlled narrative point of view...
...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches American Studies at California State University, Fresno...
...The final trip to the World's Fair is brilliantly researched...
...If you need the stimulation of rape, outrageous violence, uncontrollable passion, it is not here...
Vol. 50 • March 1986 • No. 3
