Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 31 Mar 2025
Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow
Doctorow’s 1976 novel, Ragtime (reviewed here), was the book that established him as an international bestselling writer, but for many years I have thought that it wasn’t his best novel and that that accolade must surely go to the extraordinary Billy Bathgate (1989). But having just reread it I think I may have changed my mind: it remains an extraordinary achievement, but the central trope of Billy Bathgate – the Capone-era mobster novel – has through the decades become tired with overuse, and I don’t think this extravagantly imagined and superbly written novel soars in quite the way it once did.
It is the early-1930s and New York is gripped by the ‘heroic age’ of organised crime. Doctorow’s mobster is Dutch Schultz, who is defending a criminal empire built on booze, prostitution, gambling rackets, extortion, protection, the docks, meat yards and warehouses of lower Manhattan, and the corrupt unions and the city political machines he has in his pocket. His criminal enterprise is under attack on all fronts – from prosecutors using tax evasion laws, from other gangsters muscling in, and from treachery within.
Into this world wanders Billy Bathgate, a fatherless teenage boy in thrall to the glamour of the New York mobsters. It is never, really, wealth or power or violent ascendancy he craves, although all these things play some role in his obsession. What he really wants is to belong, to be part of a family, perhaps validation of some kind – to be lifted out of the squalor and poverty of the Lower East Side ghettos, a life in which his quick-wittedness, sharp intelligence and physical dexterity – he is fleet, nimble and an adept juggler – count for something and are recognised.
But what was once a clever, indeed a remarkable idea – that of seeing the ungovernable appetites of New York’s most violent and ruthless gangsters through the eyes of a child – no longer seems remarkable. Alan Parker’s movie Bugsy Malone played with this idea a dozen years before Doctorow’s novel was published, although it must be said that the vital difference between the two approaches is that at no point is Billy Bathgate played for laughs. Indeed, quite the reverse – it is a deeply serious novel, intense and exciting, and it demands one’s full attention. Reviewers at the time noted its picaresque, headlong first person narrative. It’s ‘Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with more poetry, Holden Caulfield with more zest and spirit,’ Anne Tyler said of it. It’s ‘a modern American masterpiece,’ John Le Carré wrote, ’Doctorow takes the legacies of Fitzgerald and Cheever and adds to them a savage and erotic splendour of his own’.
What I don’t think was singled out by reviewers at the time, however, and what I think makes the novel such an extraordinary read even now, is its indebtedness – a glorious and entirely successful indebtedness, I hasten to add – to Saul Bellow. It has an implausibly articulate and astonishingly intellectual narrator of a type that often appears in Bellow’s works, the same unstoppable voice, a similar, soaring extravagance of language that rises and falls like an aria. It is all there in Billy Bathgate, moreover in the mouth of a kid, a fifteen-year old.
When the novel opens Billy has just discovered where Schultz does his downtown beer business. Schultz notices him in the shadows beneath the tracks of the elevated railway, juggling. ‘A capable kid,’ he muses, cupping the boy’s chin in his meaty paw for a fleeting moment. A few days later, Billy is stowed away on a heaving tug boat, watching Dutch and his loyalists encase the feet of a treacherous lieutenant, Bo Weinberg, in concrete, prior to hoisting him over the side into the East River. Everything else that follows flows from this first shocking encounter – including Dutch Schultz ‘inheriting’ Bo’s girlfriend, Miss Lola, and Billy’s (somewhat improbable) affair with her that at times seems sure to get him killed but perhaps in fact saves his life.
This is a novel written at such an elevated pitch of intensity – in its perception, its descriptive powers, its dialogue and interior monologues – that I suspect most readers probably either fall in love with it or are exhausted by it. But it serves to remind us of what an extraordinary craftsman Doctorow was.
Ultimately, however, what you think about this novel will largely depend on your patience with or enthusiasm for mobster novels. I finished it startled afresh by Doctorow’s talent, but also feeling that Doctorow’s novel has in a sense been left stranded by history: surrounded as we now seem to be with social, economic and political gangsterism, the idea that Capone-era mobsters might have a kind of lingering, transgressive glamour seems too thin a conceit for such an edifice to be built on.
E.L. Doctorow elsewhere on Letterpress:
The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow