Billy Bathgate
by E. L. Doctorow
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Book Summary Information
Author: E. L. DoctorowEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-12-01
ISBN: 0330311581
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of Billy Bathgate
Book Review: "Never Let The Devil Get The Draw On You"
Summary: 5 Stars
Expert storyteller E.L. Doctorow wanted to write a novel about the life of the ruthless and slightly kooky 1930's gangster Dutch Schultz, and he chose to do it in an interesting manner. Rather than doing what most every other author might and delivering a straight re-telling of the events late in Schultz's bloody career, Doctorow used the device of creating a fifteen-year-old narrator, Billy Bathgate, to relate the tale and move it forward. Billy, a smart, tough, but somehow innocent working class kid, walks us through the last year in Schultz's life and tells us about the principal players in the story, Schultz's inner circle of thugs, the rival gangs, the accountant, Bo, who betrayed Schultz when he thought his boss was headed to prison (Schultz beat the tax evasion rap with a gutsy argument that involved protection from self-incrimination) and Billy describes the smoking hot redhead society girl, first the doomed accountant's girlfriend, then Schultz's girlfriend and later Billy's, who gets her rich-girl kicks hanging with mobsters, and who ultimately contributed far more to the gang's downfall than she ever cared to know.
Billy leaves behind his none-too-sane mother and impoverished New York roots in a Jewish neighborhood and takes up as Schultz's mascot. He moves along with the gangsters as their expansionist ambitions abrade the more cautious goals of Lucky Luciano (a man so scary to Billy Bathgate that Billy never mentions him by name, even the half-century later in which the memoir of his youth is being told). He is there when Schultz plots to assassinate Thomas Dewey, future front runner in the race for the White House and then a prosecutor taking on the East Coast mob. Billy comes into the picture at the moment Schultz has reached the top of his career, and he rides the decline with him, right to the moment of the crime lord's collapse.
Billy was a witness to the "hit" in a chop house that took out the inner circle of the Schultz gang, and somehow convinces us he sneaked into the hosptial room to listen to the dying Dutchman babble through his hours-long final words, in which the fatally-wounded gangster's stream of consciousness is recorded word for word in a version Billy cautions us differs slightly from the accepted transcript.
In the closing chapter of the novel, Billy in his post-Dutch Schultz life, makes the stark transition from mobster's adopted little brother to ordinary teenager. He returns home to his mother, he goes to school, gets a job, eventually enlists in the military when the Second World War erupts. He lives as normal a life as possible. But Billy has a secret not even the piercing stare of Lucky Luciano was able to pry loose from him at his interrogation. Billy, you see, clever beyond words, has made off with the Schultz gang's fortune. He tells no one of this for years, knowing he is watched by the agents of Murder Incorporated. But when the time is right, decades in the future, a whole different age of American culture, when the Depression-era criminals like Dutch Schultz are the stuff of history books, he retrieves his justly-gotten gains and spends the crime lord's loot on a legitimate business enterprise of his own, and becomes a very rich man.
Billy Bathgate is a novel that kicks some serious posterior. Doctorow is doubly gifted as a great storyteller and a master writer.
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