reading

I finished E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair" night before last. This will be the last E. L. Doctorow book I read. It is a moderate length novel of just under 290 pages. But it isn't really a novel. The first 200 pages of it are scenes, with no real plot or much for character development. It's like he found a box of black and white photographs from the 1930's, spread them out on a table, and spent a few pages describing each scene. Finally some place after page 200 we have some hint of plot and a little more character development. At the end we finish up with a dash of symbolism so that it qualifies as "literature." So it was basically a short story worth of material padded out at the beginning to make a novel.

The book wasn't hard to read, just hard to put up with. A biography or collection of letters from the time period would have been more interesting and probably had more inherent plot. I guess I expected a historical novel to actual have the novel part. Well, lesson learned.

I think it was probably written with an eye on selling it to the movies.

1. E. L. Doctorow "World's Fair"