Book Review: The Devil in the White City
—Warning: This review may contain spoilers—
Oh, what to say about this book. The premise sounds appealing: At the turn of 19th century, a cast of creative, powerful, determined men (and some women) set out to establish Chicago as a premier destination by building the largest and most extravagant world’s fair, later dubbed “the White City.” Among these men are D.H. Burnham, who goes on to design and build the Flatiron building, and George Washington Gale Ferris, whose Ferris Wheel amazed throngs of onlookers when it debuted at the fair. Meanwhile, a few blocks away from the fair lurks a good-looking, smooth-talking, murder-happy conman of a doctor who lures naive young women into staying or working at his hotel/pharmacy/restaurant only to poison them and sell their remains to emerging medical school programs for profit. (Oh, and there’s also a crazy Irishman who ends up shooting the mayor.)
Author Erik Larson fills this book with an array of interesting of details and asides: One of the architects who helped design the fair later perished on the Titanic; Elias Disney was a carpenter at the fair, and the stories he told about what he saw there captured the imagination of his young son Walt; Kodak had invented a popular portable camera around the time of the fair and the photos taken with it were called “snap-shots,” after an English hunting term; and so on and so forth. He also blows through a veritable parade of characters who visit the White City—everyone from Susan B. Anthony to the infanata of Spain to Buffalo Bill to Houdini to Woodrow Wilson (Mark Twain was in town, but sick so he never made it to the fair). Some passages seem to exist solely for the purpose of name-dropping and they serve same the purpose as celebrity extras in a movie.
Unfortunately, what this novel doesn’t provide is a cohesive story. The details and asides are just that—they don’t propel the plot. It doesn’t help that there are at least two and a half distinct and separate (and under-developed) storylines here—the first mainly about Burnham and the building of the White City and the second about H.H. Holmes the serial killer—and as much as Larson tries to intertwine the two, the connection is a stretch. Both men happen to be in Chicago during the world fair. That’s it. But then again, so was Houdini, Wilson, and the rest of the extras. Burnham has nothing to do with the murders and Holmes has nothing to do with the fair.
The “half” story involves a possibly insane young Irishman who goes on to assassinate the mayor. He has nothing to do with the fair (the assassination didn’t even occur there) or the other murders. He may have been included because 1) the assassination happened in Chicago during the time of the fair and 2) Larson’s research unearthed enough information to warrant several passages instead of several paragraphs. Any of these stories could have been interesting on their own but here they seem thrown together (or perhaps they weren’t deemed interesting enough on their own, or weren’t long enough for a novel on their own, or weren’t original enough on their own, and were thrown together in an attempt to increase their appeal).
What saves The Devil in the White City from total collapse is Larson’s style and use of language. He’s funny: About Twain’s absence he writes, “No one saw Twain. He came to Chicago to see the fair but got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room, then left without ever seeing the White City. Of all people.” And he has a way with words: “the demonic applause of rain on rooftops”; “for this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.”
Bottom line: Larson is a gifted writer and a meticulous researcher, and this book reveals a lot of interesting trivia about the era, but it should have been more.
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