Word: doctorow
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...Doctorow, acclaimed fiction writer of works like “Ragtime” and “World’s Fair”, was slated to speak earlier this week, but had to reschedule to proof pages for an upcoming work...
Currently the Glucksman Professor in American Letters and Professor of English at New York University, Doctorow has garnered a slew of honors, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award...
Ragtime solved this problem in high style. Its storybook setting in America before World War I gave Doctorow enough distance to rewrite history. Nobody complained when Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island, Henry Ford conspired with J.R. Morgan, or Evelyn Nesbit (the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing) was converted by Anarchist Emma Goldman. Wrapped in nostalgia, Doctorow's dramatizations of rapacious capitalism, racism and revolution were defused of controversy. Unlike Daniel, a dredger of bad memories and mixed feelings, Ragtime was a safe book...
...comparison, World's Fair is downright guarded. Doctorow calls it a novel. But the book reads like a memoir, and is unmistakably based on the author's early boyhood in the Bronx. The account begins with a bed wetting in the middle of the Depression and ends on the eve of World War II with a nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler burying a cardboard time capsule containing a Tom Mix decoder badge, his school report on the life of F.D.R., a harmonica and a pair of Tootsy Toy lead rocket ships, "to show I had foreseen the future...
...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...