I completely believe Edgar "did not like Humpty Dumpty" for the reason that the egg-human "lacked all manly definition and was so irrevocably fragile", although, as a seven year-old, he probably couldn't have put it into words that way. "I had the distinct impression that death was Jewish," he tells us. His recollections have the eloquence of adulthood, but always take immense care to find a child's perspective on the world and keep to a child's interests. Rose, for example, reminds us of the 1930s' lack of conveniences: how time-consuming it was to live in a period before washing machines, before refrigeration when clothes had to be scrubbed on a washboard and all meals had to be made from scratch.ĭoctorow's narrator probably couldn't have told us this. The additional voices also help give a little more of a sense of the hardship of the era. When Donald disagrees with Edgar about how physically harsh their father was, it justifies Doctorow's decision to write the book as fiction. These are addressed to the narrator himself, in the manner an elderly relative might respond to some quizzing about a family legend. But Doctorow also adds a smattering of chapters in the voices of Rose, Dave, Donald and his aunt Frances. When Edgar tells us about his family dog being run over or the magic of the music shop were Dave works, the recollections are so clear and powerfully felt that it seems impossible that these things did not happen to the author himself. His father, mother and brother are, like Doctorow's, respectively called Dave, Rose and Donald. The narrator in World's Fair has the same first name as Doctorow, Edgar. Similarly, upon World's Fair's publication in 1985, the New York Times criticised a "peculiar" and "clumsy" mixture of memoir and fiction which now seems like a natural – perhaps even superior – precursor to Tobias Wolff's celebrated attempt to perform a not dissimilar feat in 1989's This Boy's Life. Ragtime was criticised on publication for the liberties it took with such well-known lives as Houdini's, Emma Goldman's and JP Morgan's (John Updike said it "smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets"), but it ultimately paved the way for everyone from Don DeLillo to James Ellroy to insert real life luminaries into their fiction. His books – most notably 1975's Ragtime - often zigzag through the lives of prominent 20th-century figures, with unnerving yet convincing abandon. In this way, it is a rare thing: a book that makes you miss the past and the future simultaneously.ĭoctorow is a great collector of yellowing cultural clutter, not least in his latest novel, Homer And Langley, a fictionalised account of the life of the Collyer brothers, America's most notorious hoarders. It opens in the early 30s, during the Depression – a time of Flash Gordon comics, early phonographs, and whispered dread about Hitler – and ends with the astonishing radio-controlled cars and space age structures of the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow. Looking back on a 1930s childhood in the Bronx, it's a book that quickly shrinks you down to waist height and throws you colourfully and evocatively into a speedily growing New York. "I imagined houses as superior beings who talked silently to one another," writes EL Doctorow in his sixth novel, World's Fair.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |