World's Fair

Doctorow narrates most of World's Fair through Edgar Altschuler, a bright, anxious nine-year-old absorbing the texture of late-1930s Bronx life, stoopball, radio serials, an obsessive idolization of Joe DiMaggio, while registering, without fully understanding, the mounting tension between his mother Rose, whose realism is really a defense against her husband's chronic financial failures, and his father Dave, a phonograph-and-radio salesman whose optimism keeps outrunning his actual prospects. Doctorow periodically interrupts Edgar's close, sensory child's-eye narration with first-person passages from Rose, Dave, and other relatives, a structural choice that keeps reminding the reader how much of family life a child registers without yet possessing the context to interpret.

The 1939 World's Fair itself, with its slogan "The World of Tomorrow" and its exhibits promising a gleaming, streamlined, thoroughly modern future, arrives late in the novel as the culmination of everything Edgar's Bronx childhood has been quietly rehearsing: a national fantasy of progress and abundance staged directly alongside a family barely keeping its own household solvent. Doctorow doesn't editorialize the gap, he simply lets Edgar experience the Fair's wonders, the Trylon and Perisphere, the Futurama exhibit's model highways, with total sincerity, letting the reader supply the irony a nine-year-old has no reason yet to feel.

The actual 1939 Fair buried a time capsule of contemporary artifacts meant to be opened five thousand years later, and Doctorow builds the novel's closing image directly from that real historical gesture, letting Edgar's own private ritual of preservation answer, on a child's scale, the same impulse that produced the Fair's most famous exhibit: a need to believe the present moment is worth explaining to somebody who isn't here yet.

Doctorow gives Edgar's mother Rose her own extended first-person chapters recounting her parents' immigration and her own hard, disappointed girlhood, material Edgar himself has no access to and could not yet understand if he did. Setting Rose's harder, more skeptical memory directly against her son's wondering present-tense narration lets the novel argue, quietly, that the optimism a child mistakes for simply how the world is has usually been paid for by an adult's much less innocent experience.