World’s Fair

E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair is a wonderfully poignant creation of a certain New York City boyhood of the 19305, seen simultaneously through the eyes of the child himself and through those of the adult who recollects that childhood. It is a time of innocence and Depression—summer dance bands in the Catskills and comic-strip adventures in the Daily Mirror, football games at the Polo Grounds and rumors of war in the evening news. In successively smaller Bronx apartments, with their Venetian blinds, their knickknacks, their familiar furnishings packed ever closer, a mother ekes out a precarious budget from the tenuous profits of the father's Times Square music store. Near the schoolyard, the boy spots the German zeppelin Hindenburg looming sudden and majestic over the housetops, its nose tilted down, before it silently recedes, a speck over the Manhattan skyline. The family—the parents and their two sons—struggles to hold together and to move apart, braces against hardship, nurtures hopes of better times. And all of it leads irresistibly to the glittering, futuristic promise of the New York World's Fair of 1939, where the young protagonist at the age of nine crosses over into a future of his own.

Doctorow's stunning achievement in World's Fair is to imagine this world of the 1930's—both the actual life the child led, only half comprehending, and the world the adult reconstructs, imperfectly remembering. Inseparable and irreconcilable, their mingled versions of the past exquisitely capture the shifting texture of experience itself, in what is bound to become a classic novel of a child's life.