July 4, 2011

Book 23: The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
Erik Larson

History, just like our own times, can hardly be accused of being boring, and it is beyond refreshing to come across a writer who understands not only that the past is composed of billions of stories but also that these deserve to be related with energy and vivid prose. Quite simply, Erik Larson gets it, and The Devil in the White City is a carefully researched, well crafted, and extremely engaging history of the United States on the verge of the 20th century. The story is told through two tenuously connected personalities and the visions they represent: serial killer Herman Mudgett, whose hotel of horrors operated just a short train ride from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and Daniel Burnham, the fair's chief architect. Though Larson treats the connection between the two very sparingly, the stories are told parallel to each other and occasionally intersect. This has both good and bad effects on the book, and while each story is well told and supported by a strong body of research, sometimes the organization of The Devil in the White City can make it tricky to follow the not-always-interlocking strands Larson weaves. That chapters usually alternate makes it easy enough for readers to keep the two stories separate, but the author has a nasty habit of offering tantalizing little hints that dangle uselessly, often forgotten by the time their particular threads are picked up again. The most egregious of these can take nearly 100 pages to be resolved or, if one counts some parts of the introduction, the entire book.

That Larson insists on doing this so often is frustrating, particularly because the book is exceptionally well constructed in its other aspects. Though some of the bits about Mudgett can become a bit repetitive, as much of that is due to his development of a modus operandi as to elements within the author's control. Indeed, Larson does a great job rendering Mudgett in rich detail and three-dimensional characterization, attempting to get inside his mind but retaining in his prose a feeling of humanity and sympathy for the victims. Likewise, though he often gets ahead of himself and dots the text with occasional non-sequitur half-paragraphs, Larson's account of the development of the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition is thorough and entertaining. The book is humorous, and though it glances over the dedication ceremony (an odd lapse given the author's focus on the severely limited timetable for the fair's construction), it provides other welcome asides that help readers gain a sense of the historical context in which the fair was planned, constructed, and visited by millions. Information about landscape and building architecture, the seediness of Chicago and its rivalry with New York City, and about criminal pathology do not linger so long as to wear out their welcome, and it is one of Larson's great achievements that he sets the scene so vividly without the necessity of a prolonged contextual introduction. Despite some repetition and the annoying half-revelations, Larson's prose is readable and his account gripping, a truly enjoyable work of popular history that is engaging from start to finish. The Devil in the White City is an excellent vision of a world on the brink of change, and encapsulates the end of the 19th century in the brief, glamorous perfection that was the White City of the 1893 World's Fair, in stark contrast to the madness of Herman Mudgett and the coming century.

Grade: A

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