Review: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City tells the tale of Chicago at the end of 19th century as the city struggled to complete Columbian Exposition World’s Fair, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. Erik Larson decided to focus on two men: Daniel Burnham, the architect who masterminded the building of World’s Fair, and H. H. Holmes, Chicago’s first serial killer. As one man seeks to bring beauty to a dirty, polluted city, collaborating with many of the great architects of his time, the other builds his own secret paradise under the guise of a hotel for the World’s Fair.
Larson’s basically telling two stories. The first is all about the planning and construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The second focuses on H. H. Holmes and his methods for committing insurance fraud and murdering young women. There’s also a third minor narrative about Patrick Eugene Prendergast, an angry newspaper distributor obsessed with Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison. But the problem is that all of these threads DO NOT TIE TOGETHER. The only connection Holmes has to the Chicago Fair is that lived in Chicago at the same time and MAY have attended the fair. Prendergast is only drawn into the rest of the narrative when he assassinates Mayor Harrison in the Fair’s closing days; otherwise he has NOTHING to do with the rest of the book. It was very frustrating, trying to figure out how all these figures fit together, only to realize at the end that they didn’t fit at all!
The author also has the most aggravating habit of ham-handed suspense; he would introduce a person as “a steel inspector from Pittsburgh” and then refuse to give the man’s name until the fourth or fifth time he’s mentioned, fifty or a hundred pages later. It made it rather difficult to keep track of minor characters. Larson also repeated his statistics or facts frequently, adding to the book’s length without enhancing the content.
The Devil in the White City sounds like title of a murder mystery, not a treatise on Chicago’s architecture or an account of the minutiae of the Columbian Exposition. (I suppose the phrase ‘the devil’s in the details’ would apply, though.) In terms of the page count, Holmes and his murder victims are perhaps a third of the book. It would have been much better to take Holmes out and have this book focus on just the Chicago Fair; although Erik Larson fills his pages with detail, including multiple menus from banquets various architects attended (why?) he leaves out the trivia that would have interested me, like products/foods that first appeared at the Fair, more information about the Fair’s impact on the country and the world, etc. Perhaps if he hadn’t tried to bring Holmes into the book, he would have finished fleshing out the fair. Likewise, the facts about Holmes are scanty at best; at times his story reads more like a novel than the ‘non-fiction’ category under which this book is sold. Larson should have written a historical fiction about the character so he could fully indulge his artistic license.
One positive note: I listened to this book as an audio CD and narrator Scott Brick was fantastic. He’s really an excellent book reader; very clear, distinct voice, great pacing, and a very nuanced performance. Look for his name when you’re listening to audio books:
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