"Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies."

pygmy possum

pygmy tarsier

African pygmy hedgehog

 Just when you think Olmsted can't get any sicker. Just when you think the next architect could possibly come up with something more outlandish. Just when you think Holmes won't find another woman, or one will finally figure him out. Just when you think the storms can't get any worse, a winter any colder, the rain any fiercer, the strikes more inopportune, the deaths more untimely, the fair better attended--or more poorly attended, for that matter--the Ferris wheel any more anticipated, the events any wilder...well, they do.

Nothing can be out done. The power of this book lies in its lists, with Larson's ability to never skimp, to never cut corners, to always--much like the events of the fair itself--go to the the extreme. This seems more a story about an era, the peak of the industrial revolution, of over-the-top opulence and of abject poverty, than it does a narrative of the fair or the story of Holmes. Through his see-sawing between story lines, and by exhaustively listing the absolute best and the absolute worst of everything, Larson captures the tumult of the time and place. This book is all about sense of place for me: The bleak shores of Lake Michigan, the vision (always from above, I picture it) of the river reversing and the black stream leaking out into the lake, the wind and storms and flatness, the "blackness," the absolute stench of the stockyards. I can't believe that this World Fair holds so many firsts. I think the era is best captured by this image on pages 284-85: "Chief Standing Bear rode the Ferris Wheel in full ceremonial headdress, his two hundred feathers unruffled." Or maybe this: "The significance of the moment escaped no one. Here was one of the greatest heroes of America's past saluting one of the foremost heroes of its future" (286). Like watching the Ferris wheel rain down loose bolts, we're looking on, wondering--will it hold?

By using lists, Larson is forced to be completely even-handed throughout. The book's tension begins immediately with the opening of Part I: "How easy it was to disappear" (11), and is suspended throughout. I keep thinking of the graph teachers used to draw when explaining storytelling, the rising action, climax, falling action...but this story feels like all climax, a thin tense line drawn across the length of the chalkboard. I think this very tension makes the braiding of the two stories important--when we leave one story we can take a quick breath, maybe become distracted from whatever ominous hint Larson has left us dangling with in order to feel its full effect pages later.

I must admit the foreshadowing did little to keep me engaged in the story. I was engaged--fully--but it was because of the details, because I hadn't realized just how absurd and unreal the fair really was (and the time period, too), not because of the plot. Even Holmes's plot (which I was quite drawn to--sometimes I just wanted to rush through the details of geraniums and bulrushes to see who his next victim would be (poor Olmsted, I know))--after his fifth or sixth victim the absurdity of his crimes stopped feeling so absurd. And therefore, Larson's little cliffhangers weren't so effective. I think it's interesting that the cliffhangers changed in tone throughout the book. The tone became lighter, and Larson steps in as a narrator here and there to comment on the events: "Of all people," he says on 285, to have missed the fair--Mark Twain. Here Larson's banking on his audience's knowledge, allowing us to speculate on what Twain might have written, giving a nudge to the king of the absurd.

Less jokingly, the cliffhangers served more as little commentary or punchlines throughout. At one point some of the sections sort of felt like sonnets (without the lyricism)--something's happening in the body of the paragraph, then the mood shifts in the last couple of lines. Often, the lines were even set off. For example, on the top of 226 when Olmsted gets what he wants, the paragraph ends with, "Even this flicker of optimism was about to disappear, however, for a powerful weather front was moving across the prairie, toward Chicago." I think it's interesting the way Larson moves us through the events like this. Sometimes it feels like we're just being hurried along, and other times I liked his subtle commentary, his narrative aid--they served to break up the lists of facts and details and allowed me to get my bearings before moving on. It gave the book a very episodic feeling, but more like a documentary and less like a crime piece.

Larson treats his characters much like he treats the events--very evenhandedly. We get so many details about a person and a wonderful sense of character, yet they're still held at arms' length. I never feel any real attachment for Burnham or Holmes, yet I'm deeply attached to understanding how the characters connect with one another (not between those two, but between each and his respective group). I liked learning how cantankerous the architects could be with each other--that dynamic was really interesting. Perhaps that's what the book is about--dynamics. I guess he says it at the beginning: "In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black" (xi).  But I was puzzled as to why Larson is so keen on explaining that every quotation comes from "a letter, memoir, or other written document" (xi) because even if he's not inventing what was spoken, it seems to me he's inventing emotion, thoughts, and body language. It gave the characters a strange feel--again, like we're held at arms length. We're allowed to see them up close, but we're never allowed to really hear them. Just a few places where I noted the narrator blatantly giving us a character's emotion: "But this night he felt ill at ease, a choirboy among cardinals" (80), "Now and then he and Burnham caught each other's glances" (95); "She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly engrossing" (148); and, of course, Anna in the chamber: "As she considered this, she became a bit frightened. The room had grown substantially warmer. Catching a clean breath was difficult. And she needed a bathroom" (295). I absolutely love this moment in the book because for once we ARE inside a character's head, right there with her, feeling what she's feeling. It's tense and gripping. But then there's that question: How could he possibly know what was going through her mind? And does he feel it's okay to speculate here because it's so obvious that he's speculating, because she dies in the next few minutes? The other moments could be said to have been extrapolated from his extensive research, but here is a truly impossible moment, which makes me believe that the other moments are equally invented on his part.

I personally don't have issue with this; to me he didn't really cross any line. But I think it's interesting that he seems a little hypocritical in his intro, breaking rules he seems to be such a stickler for. And as I continue on in my own journey of deciding when and if I should embellish, it's interesting to look at different examples of how people do it, and how they get away with it.