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World's Fair is not a happy book. The dreariness of the '30s and the strains of family life appear to have had a bad effect on Edgar's style. He is either too terse or verbosely academic, as if the boy grew up to be a literary critic rather than a novelist. Evocations of his time and place are frequently bloated with pretentious prose: "In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself to be ... As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing ... Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock ... I had discovered in myself the double personality engendered by school: the good attentive boy in class, the raucous, unsprung Dionysian in the schoolyard at recess."
Doctorow's artifacts have a familiar, wistful charm. Yet there is a curious defensiveness to his enterprise. Tone seems to have been substituted for emotion; artiness replaces vitality. Doctorow aims for a myth that would link a nation on the edge of war and a boy approaching adolescence, but he is too cautious with his material. He calls the book a novel, yet it has few of the elements usually associated with the form. A melancholy Edgar ticks off his experiences and observations; his mother, brother and aunt make brief personal appearances, while the father remains silent and remote. Even the Bronx is incompletely perceived. Granted that it is not New York City's most glamorous borough, it is home to the Yankees and one of the world's great zoos. Neither attraction appears in the book, understandable if Doctorow had written a memoir, but a lost opportunity in a novel about growing up with "King Kong" Keller and other great apes in the neighborhood. --By R.Z. Sheppard