Author | E. L. Doctorow |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Crime |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1989 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 323 pp |
Billy Bathgate is a 1989 novel by author E. L. Doctorow that won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle award for fiction for 1990, [1] the 1990 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, [2] the 1990 William Dean Howells Medal, [3] and was the runner-up for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize [4] and the 1989 National Book Award. [5] The book was dedicated to Jason Epstein. [6]
A film based on the novel was released in 1991 to very mixed reviews. [7]
Billy Behan is an impoverished fifteen-year-old living in The Bronx with his mother. One afternoon, Billy is present when infamous Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz arrives to inspect a shipment of illegal beer. When Billy demonstrates his skill at juggling, an amused Schultz calls him a "capable boy" and tips him. Billy later finds and infiltrates Schultz's offices without being seen, resulting in Schultz's accountant and trusted advisor Otto Berman agreeing to take him into the gang. To avoid the stigma of having an Irish boy work for a Jewish crime boss, Billy changes his last name to "Bathgate" after a local street.
When Berman tasks Billy to spy on the gangsters who go to Schultz's nightclub, Billy witnesses Bo Weinberg, Schultz's lieutenant, meeting with a pair of men affiliated with the rival Italian mafia. Believing that Weinberg is a traitor, Schultz has him and his girlfriend, a socialite named Drew Preston, kidnapped at gunpoint. Billy follows them out to a riverboat, where he witnesses Schultz having Weinberg thrown into the East River with his feet encased in cement. Afterwards, Schultz has Billy take Drew back to her apartment to gather her things. Billy discovers Drew is married, and that her wealthy husband, Harvey, is gay.
Seeing Schultz as simply the latest of her sexual conquests, Drew agrees to become his gun moll and is taken with him when he settles in Onondaga as part of his plan to avoid conviction for tax evasion. Billy poses as Schulz's ward with Drew as his governess, while Schultz works to win over the locals by paying off debts, making charitable gifts, and even converting to Roman Catholicism at the town church. One afternoon, Drew goes for a country hike with Billy and asks him to tell her the truth about Bo's death. She then scrambles down the side of a waterfall and swims in the pool underneath, where Billy comforts her. Eventually, the two start an affair.
On the day of the trial, Berman instructs Billy to take Drew to the horse races at Saratoga Springs. Billy quickly realizes that he's been set up, and that Schultz has arranged for his best hitmen to kill Drew as he fears she will implicate him in Bo's murder. Billy uses the allowance Berman provided him with to have flowers and expensive gifts delivered to Drew, making it impossible for her to be harmed without attracting attention. The ruse buys enough time for Harvey, whom Billy contacted beforehand, to pick up Drew and take her out of the country to safety. Billy, questioned as to why he bought the gifts, lies and says that he bought them on impulse without admitting his relationship with Drew. Schultz is acquitted, but his enemy, federal prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, issues an arrest order for the mobster if he returns to New York.
Schultz flees to Newark and sets up an office in the back room of a chophouse. Against Berman's advice that going after Dewey would not sit well with the other gangs, Schultz decides to assassinate his enemy and orders Billy to case his apartment block. Just as Billy returns, Mafia gunmen storm the restaurant; Schultz, Berman, and their bodyguards are killed. Billy is small enough to escape out of a bathroom window and returns in time for the dying Berman to give Billy the code to Schultz's personal safe. Billy sneaks into the hospital and notes down the delirious Schultz's stream of consciousness monologue as he is dying, using clues from this to locate the exact spot where Dutch has buried all of his money.
The Mafia tries to intimidate Billy into giving up the money, but he convinces them that only Schultz's lawyer, Dixie Davis, knows where it is. Billy then returns to the Bronx and moves back in with his mother. A year later, Drew, having given birth to Billy's child, gives him sole custody. Using the contents of Schultz's safe, Billy is able to attend college and fight in World War II. After being discharged, he returns to New York and quietly digs up Schultz's fortune, planning to use it to build a new life for himself and his family.
Billy Bathgate is the eighth in a series of what critic James Wood has called "intricate historical brocades". Earlier novels by Doctorow that were also set in the 1930s include Loon Lake and World's Fair ; the latter also shares poetical evocations of the Bronx in which the author himself grew up. Doctorow has described his novel as "a young man's sentimental education in the tribal life of gangsters". [8] A reviewer saw in it "Doctorow’s shapeliest piece of work: a richly detailed report of a 15-year-old boy's journey from childhood to adulthood". [9]
In a radio broadcast, Doctorow described the novel's genesis in a picture, whose origin he could no longer remember, of men in tuxedos and black tie on a tugboat. Trying to interpret that image prompted him to ponder "the culture of gangsterism" and its mythic appeal. The novel leads off with Billy's description of Bo Weinberg's execution (before backtracking to account for how he got there): a performance of which Doctorow explained that "the very first sentence I wrote in Billy Bathgate is the first sentence that appears in the book, and it actually delivered the character Billy to me. He was sort of built into the diction and the syntax, and even the rhythm of the sentence gave me the way he breathed." [10] With this as a start, the novel develops into what is largely a first person monologue, less narration than an act of lyrical remembrance.
In fact, the act of speaking and its interpretation is at the heart of the novel. Through paying close attention to the gangster's death-bed ramblings, Billy finds the clue to locate Schultz's hidden treasure. And as he himself describes, such attention also leads to his equally valuable discovery of the verbal means to preserve as a lasting memory the lesson of what is otherwise a purely destructive force. "Whereas Schultz's rage appropriates everything to his need to destroy, Billy's words bear permanent witness to whatever is threatened with impermanence." [11]
While most reviewers responded to Doctorow's verbal dexterity and reinterpretation of historical facts, they found the ending unconvincingly sentimental. [12] [13] [14] And for one interpreter, at least, the entire plot was grounded in sentimentality, "pure and defiant daydream" based on pulp fiction, its deficiency disguised in a heightened prose that scarcely stops to draw breath and a "vocabulary charged with overkill". [15]
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, published during the preceding calendar year.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.
Underworld is a 1997 novel by American writer Don DeLillo. The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Described as both postmodernist and a reaction to postmodernism, it examines themes of nuclear proliferation, waste, and the contribution of individual lives to the course of history.
Dutch Schultz was an American mobster based in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. He made his fortune in organized crime-related activities, including bootlegging and the numbers racket. Schultz's rackets were weakened by two tax evasion trials led by United States Attorney Thomas Dewey, and also threatened by fellow mobster Lucky Luciano.
A Bronx Tale is a 1993 American coming-of-age crime drama film directed by and starring Robert De Niro in his directorial debut and produced by Jane Rosenthal, adapted from Chazz Palminteri's 1989 play of the same name. It tells the coming-of-age story of an Italian-American boy, Calogero, who, after encountering a local Mafia boss, is torn between the temptations of organized crime and the values of his honest, hardworking father, as well as racial tensions in his community. The Broadway production was converted to film with limited changes, and starred Palminteri and De Niro.
Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll was an Irish-American mob hitman in the 1920s and early 1930s in New York City. Coll gained notoriety for the alleged accidental killing of a young child during a mob kidnap attempt.
Otto Biederman, known as Otto "Abbadabba" Berman was an accountant for American organized crime. He is known for having coined the phrase "Nothing personal, it's just business."
Hoodlum is a 1997 American crime drama film that gives a fictionalized account of the gang war between the Italian/Jewish mafia alliance and the black gangsters of Harlem that took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The film concentrates on Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano.
Foreign Affairs is a 1984 novel by American writer Alison Lurie that concerns itself with American academics in England. The novel won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1985, and was nominated for the 1984 National Book Award.
The March: A Novel is a 2005 historical fiction novel by E. L. Doctorow. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2006) and the National Book Critics Circle Award/Fiction (2005).
Billy Bathgate is a 1991 American biographical gangster film directed by Robert Benton, starring Loren Dean as the title character and Dustin Hoffman as real-life gangster Dutch Schultz. The film co-stars Nicole Kidman, Steven Hill, Steve Buscemi and Bruce Willis. Although Billy is a fictional character, at least four of the other characters in the film are real people. The screenplay was adapted by British writer Tom Stoppard from E.L. Doctorow's 1989 novel of the same name. Doctorow distanced himself from the film for the extensive deviations from the book. It received negative reviews and was a box-office bomb, grossing a mere $15.5 million against its $48 million budget.
Karen Friedman Hill is an American woman known for her involvement in the American Mafia through her husband Henry Hill, who was an associate of the Lucchese crime family. The events of their lives were chronicled in the 1990 film Goodfellas and several books.
Jack Dempsey's Broadway Restaurant, known popularly as Jack Dempsey's, was a restaurant located in the Brill Building on Broadway between 49th Street and 50th Streets in Manhattan, New York City.
Abraham "Bo" Weinberg was a Jewish New York City mobster who became a hitman and chief lieutenant for the Prohibition-era gang boss Dutch Schultz. As Schultz expanded his bootlegging operations into Manhattan during Prohibition, he recruited Abe Weinberg and his brother George into his gang. Abe Weinberg would become one of Schultz's top gunmen during the Manhattan Bootleg Wars and was a suspect in the later high-profile gangland slayings of Jack "Legs" Diamond, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, and mob boss Salvatore Maranzano.
The Waterworks (1994) is a book by American writer E. L. Doctorow. It was his eighth published novel.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is an American author working in experimental feminist and queer fiction. She is best known for her novels Burn, V, and The Mikvah Queen, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her novel, Bhopal Dance (2018), won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize in 2017.
Mitch Berman is an American fiction writer known for his imaginative range, exploration of characters beyond the margins of society, lush prose style and dark humor.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. The book is a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha. The book centers on the mostly self-destructive characters of different ages who, as they grow older, are sent in unforeseen, and sometimes unusual, directions by life. The stories shift back and forth in time from the 1970s to the present and into the near future. Many of the stories take place in and around New York City, although other settings include San Francisco, Italy, and Kenya.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
The Dutch House is a 2019 novel by Ann Patchett. It was published by Harper on September 24, 2019. It tells the story of a brother and sister, Danny and Maeve Conroy, who grow up in a mansion known as the Dutch House, and their lives over five decades.