Allocate
your precious reading hours
to Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City
& Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole
By María Eugenia
Guerra
The Devil in the White
City.
By Erik Larson.
New York: Crown Publishers.
2003. 304 pages.
That Old Ace in the
Hole.
By Annie Proulx.
New York: Scribner.
2002. 384 pages.
I've committed the cardinal sin of readers of good
literature, a sin prompted by visiting the book store
too often. I put aside Donna Tartt's The Little Friend
to begin reading Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the
Hole, which I set aside to read Erik Larson's The
Devil in the White City.
Larson is the author of Isaac's Storm, the well-crafted
story of the 1901 hurricane that destroyed most of
Galveston. One of Larson's strengths as a writer is
his ability to weave seemingly disparate threads into
the same story, which is exactly what he did with
such purpose in Devil in the White City. Larson's
vehicles are two men -- one Daniel Hudson Burnham,
the renowned Chicago architect who directed the design
and the construction of the Chicago World's Fair of
1893 (the Columbus Exposition), the other a young
psychotic physician named Henry H. Holmes, who feeds
his murderous desires by luring new arrivals in Chicago
into his cheesy World's Fair Hotel just west of the
fairgrounds. Sticking in essence to the historical
record for the transformation of swampy Jackson Park
into the splendor of Chicago's Columbus Exposition,
Larson populates Burnham's learned sphere with the
best architects in the country (including Fredrick
Law Olmstead, who designed New York's Central Park).
While Burnham and his associates move through the
lofty echelons of Chicago society and government to
hammer out the finer points of the rush to build the
fair, Dr. Holmes, the Devil in the White City, lures
one young woman after another into his strange and
dark three-story hotel, a many-chambered structure
that included a crematorium, dissection tables, and
a gas chamber.
Should the women happen to have arrived at Holmes'
hotel with children or a sister, all meet the same
fate. If they arrived with ownership of property or
money, there are promises of marriage and legal exercises
to assign property to him before he disposes of them.
Corpses from which he has removed skin (or amputated
club feet) to preclude identification go to an "articulator"
who removes all flesh and then delivers, per Holmes'
instructions, skeletons to physicians, medical schools,
and research entities.
Burnham's heroics to harness the talents of some of
the most artistic minds in the nation while moving
massive amounts of earth to build the fair contrasts
with Holmes' machinations to feed his sick needs.
The work of both men was daunting, massive -- Burnham's
setbacks and his victories spelled out in headlines,
Holmes' serial murders just a few blocks away shrouded
by the darkness outside the cast of dim gas lights.
How could a murderer of such vast appetite go undetected?
How is it Holmes, who moved large trunks about (corpses
going to the articulator, skeletons being shipped
to buyers), would not create suspicion? Larson explains
simply that such was the atmosphere of Chicago in
those days that young women arriving daily by train
in great numbers were sucked into the miasma of a
city in a riot of growth, a city whose streets ran
with mud, raw sewage, stock yard offal, and blood.
Some of those young women might surface later to get
in touch with their families or move on; some, like
those who had the misfortune to be lured by Holmes'
riveting blue eyes and his earnestness, simply disappeared.
Larson's The Devil in the White City is a story about
power, the power of two men living at the polar opposites
of light and darkness. A supporting cast of real-life
personages like Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan
B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, George Ferris (as in the
Ferris Wheel that made its premiere at the exposition),
the young Frank Lloyd Wright, Annie Oakley, Harry
Houdini, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and the irreverent
Infanta Eulalia (the youngest sister of Spain's dead
king Alfonso XII and the daughter of exiled Queen
Isabel II) enrich this amazing story that could as
well be the program notes for a confab for the Gilded
Age, that epoch in which the United States moved with
such industry to show the world that it was not a
wild frontier. The Infanta is my own personal favorite
of those who appear in cameo, a woman who shrugged
off the official duties of visiting socialites for
a chow-down of sausage, kraut, and cold brew at the
fair's German village.
Larson came across the stories of the World's Columbian
Exposition, Burnham, and Holmes while he researched
Isaac's Storm. The gifted narrator and wordsmith read
exhaustively of the lives of his characters to build
the compelling parallel stories of two men he calls
"cultural antipodes that each embodied some element
of the forces then propelling America toward the 20th
century."
That I was able to read the last 10 chapters of The
Devil in the White City on my porch on a cool afternoon
in which a sweet little thunderstorm gently pounded
the ranchlands all around me made the delicious exercise
of reading Larson all the more pleasurable.
All this to say that after I finished The Devil in
the White City, I doubled back to find Proulx' That
Old Ace in the Hole and commenced reading it to the
finish.
Though it is evident Proulx had a great deal of fun
writing this tale of mirth and whoa! about the panhandles
of north Texas and Oklahoma -- particularly in the
whimsical names she chose for people (Bob Dollar,
Freda Beautyrooms) and places (Woolybucket, Texas),
it is by no means an indulgence. It is like all Proulx'
work -- The Shipping News, for which she won a Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction, Accordion Crimes, etc.) -- lyrical
and well told.
I had the impulse, as I laughed aloud at the names
and the foibles of this windblown panhandle community,
to discount this work as less serious than some of
her other labors, but that was just not possible.
She is so good at engaging you to the point, to the
precise pitch of knowing a character or a landscape.
Literary moments that seem like abrupt departures
or digressions from the story at hand end up being
delicious, albeit circuitous steps taken to get you
there after all.
The story's main character, newcomer Bob Dollar, is
so bland, ordinary, malleable, and guileless that
even as he goes about the clandestine business of
trying to talk Panhandle ranchers into selling their
ranches to Global Pork Rind, he is disarming and himself
gullible.
There's not much action or movement in That Old Ace
in the Hole, but what story there is, is rich in polemic
and the depth of the irresistible characters who inhabit
Woolybucket, folks who are as much instruments of
resistance to change as witnesses to it.
Stay tuned for a review of Donna Tartt's The Little
Friend.
