Word: edgar
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Like generations of authors before him, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow blends fact and fancy and calls the results novels. His tragedy of political passion, The Book of Daniel, was based conspicuously on the Rosenberg atom-spy case. Although he changed names and broadened perspectives, it was impossible to turn a page without thinking about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on their way to the electric chair. The real had again overpowered the imagined...
...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...
...Little Edgar is a witness to the nation's possibilities. He has been to the 1939-40 World's Fair, with its models of superhighways, bullet-shaped automobiles, electrical appliances and television, or "picture radio." He has, in fact, been there twice. The first time he accompanied a friend whose mother worked with Oscar the Amorous Octopus, a titillating sideshow at the amusement park. He returned on a family pass that he had won for his fawning entry in a typical-American-boy contest. The essay is heavy with irony. It also introduces a writer who knows what it takes...
...Edgar is no stranger to portentousness. Three years earlier he watched the German airship Hindenburg float overhead on its way to Lakehurst, N.J., where it exploded at its mooring. But such encounters with history are few and infrequent. Mostly he catalogs childhood sights and sounds: his dog Pinky, knickers and knee socks, a backyard igloo in winter, a beach in summer. Occasionally his mother Rose breaks into the narrative to complain about her respectable poverty, her husband's failure as a businessman, his card playing and carousing. Dave Altschuler is part owner of a music store located in Manhattan...
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...