E.L. Doctorow Takes Us Back to Futurama

Imagine taking your late-model time machine for a spin around the block and—BAM!—you land in 1939, a year when America teetered between the dark years of the Great Depression and the equally dark years of the coming world war. You’re in New York City—the Queens, to be exact—and there, right in front of you, is a dazzlingly bright plaza filled with thousands of people milling around skyscrapers with waterfalls cascading from the roofs, a 250-foot parachute-drop ride, a building shaped like a cash register and, at the heart of it all, two of the oddest pieces of architecture you’ve ever seen: a needle-like tower (taller than the Washington Monument) and a sphere 180 feet in diameter. Known as the Trylon and Perisphere, both are so white it makes your eyes hurt just to look at them. Welcome to the 1939 World’s Fair.

Don’t have a time machine? No problem, just open the pages of E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair and you’ll be transported back to a slightly more innocent and certainly more naive period in American history.

As in many of his other novels (Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks), Doctorow takes a splinter of time and turns it into a log of wider meanings. Leaf through the pages of World’s Fair and you’ll get a (ahem) fair share of the Fair itself (albeit only after 300 pages), but you’ll also learn about the way Americans hoped and dreamed about a better life.

The novel, much like Ragtime, explores the dynamics of a single family and, in particular, young Edgar who longs to pay his two bits and get inside the front gate of the World’s Fair. Once in the shadow of the Trylon and Perisphere, he dreams of romping through visions of a brighter, more perfect future. Anything has to be better than the grimy streets of New York and the squabbling families that surround him.

Doctorow has made a keen choice by using the World’s Fair as his theme. The Fair, which sprawled across more than 1,200 acres and was a place where sixteen million hot dogs were consumed, was all about optimism and giddy excitement over the future—all of it reaching a fever pitch in the most popular display of the whole Fair: Futurama. This was a multi-media experience where fairgoers sat on cushioned train cars that whisked them sideways over a diorama showing a typical American city of the distant future—1960, to be exact. The huge diorama showed fourteen-lane superhighways, unrealistically clean sidewalks, orchards where all the fruit trees are under giant glass jars and power plants where “atomic energy is used cautiously.”

Of course, World’s Fair has a streak of irony running through it. The future did not turn out so bright after all—not for America, and not even for Edgar. By the novel’s end, there’s a cloud of sadness surrounding the characters. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Edgar loses a bit of his innocence at the Fair and comes away an older and wiser little boy.

Whenever I pick up a Doctorow novel, I know I’m in for a rich, densely-worded reading experience. World’s Fair is no exception. The sentences are simple with little variation in rhythm and construction. Here’s a prime example of Doctorow’s unadorned (yet lovely) prose as Edgar enters the Fair for the first time:

The shuffle of feet was like a constant whispering in my ears, or what I imagined a herd of antelope would sound like going in great numbers slowly through high grass. We went around Commerce Circle and through the Plaza of Light and right around the Trylon and Perisphere, which, up close, seemed to fill the sky. The pictures of them hadn’t suggested their enormity. They were the only white objects to be seen. They were dazzling. They seemed to be about to take off, they looked lighter than air.

Some readers may not have the patience for the thick paragraphs and relatively slow pace. I, however, was completely caught up in Doctorow’s word-pictures. The details of 1939 New York are so vivid, so sensory that it’s almost like reading a memoir. And—checking Doctorow’s biography—it should come as no surprise that he was born in 1931 and grew up in New York City. By the way, ever wonder what the “E.” in “E.L.” stands for? That’s right, his first name is Edgar.

Note: I’d also recommend the excellent 1939: The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter which gives a very readable history of the events Doctorow touches on.