| Show - 2E The Salt Lake Tribune - - Sunday February 26 1989 Doctorow pens Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow Random House 336 pp$1995 E L Doctorow has his own ideas about how America works Right from the start his fiction has built toward a Revised Version of the national myth — one that has in it elements of Genesis Exodus and Ecclesiastes not to mention The Book of Daniel the title of his apocalyptic third novel Billy Bathgate may be his Book of Kings a genealogy of how power is acquired exercised and transmitted in this country In 1960 Welcome to Hard Times began Doctorow's career of trifling with our most cherished pop icons A bad man rides into a raw unnamed town in the Dakota Territory during the 1870s and immediately threatens rape pillage and murder Every d American movie-goe- r knows what's supposed to happen next: The inexperienced but plucky lawman played by Tony Perkins (or case played by Gary the burnt-ou- t Cooper) musters his courage and eventually faces down and kills the loudmouthed bad man who is probably called Bogardus and rides off into the sunset with the new schoolmarm as the music crescendoes to an orgiastic crash But that isn't what happens in Hard Times The Bad Man from e routs the town's unofficial mayor (who as narrator admits to being "a bumbler by nature") and commits rape pillage and murder — and for good measure arson by burning the whole place down On his return at the end a youth he had orphaned in the first rampage kills him and rides off to be the new Bad Man leaving the painfully rebuilt town to fall apart after the silver mines fail All this is worth recalling because Billy Bathgate Doctorow's seventh novel follows a similarly oedipal pattern of action with instructive elaborations: A youth in his teens is v:3517 Book $alt alit ' Review apprenticed (this time willingly) to an outlaw and succeeds to the outlaw's power and his woman as part of decline and this father-figure'- s death in which the youth is closely involved The pseudonymous Billy Bath-gat- e at 15 and living with a demented mother in a New York tenement has "imperial ambitions" that begin to be realized when he "catches on" with the Dutch Schultz mob after the gang chief notices this "capable boy" juggling outside one of his Bronx beer drops (It's an indication of Schultz's incipient decline that in 1934 the first year of Repeal he's still operating by Prohimethods bition rules — his gang-wa- r are obsolete as Abbadabba Berman d brain-trus- numbers wizard t keeps trying to tell him) Although the story is being told in the first person by the wealthy and powerful adult Billy has become it begins with the boy's breathless account of Schultz and his aides executing a treacherous partner after loading him — dinner jacket date and all — aboard a tugboat and heading out into the dark Atlantic Doctorow shrewdly splits this narrative into several parts building toward a climax at the center of the novel that will stay in the reader's mind a long long time Billy's first view of the event after he has jumped uninvited to the deck of the tug includes this: "Now not just his feet but his legs to the knees 4 were exposed Irving rose from his kneeling position and offered his arm and Bo Weinberg took it like some princess at a ball and delicately gingerly placed one foot at a time in the laundry tub in front of him that was filled with wet cement" From here on Billy understands he has entered a different moral universe where all kinds of laws are suspended or even reversed: "The first thing you learn is there are no ordinary rules of the night and day there A are just different kinds of light strong ethic prevailed all the normal umbrages and hurts were in operation all the outraged sensibilities of once you accepted the justice first pure inverted premise" The alert reader will notice that the voice here is a little like Mailer's and a lot like Bellow's in Augie March another philosophical novel that reads like an adventure story and that is dense with detail of a remembered world freshly imagined In fact Billy Bathgate reads almost like a revision of Treasure Island in which all the existential and erotic implications of a boy's induction into a criminal world are faced head-o- n It's a protean world of continual transformation where the ruling deity originally Arthur Flegenheimer is renamed after a Bronx hoodlum of legendary toughness "the first Dutch Schultz" of "the Frog Hollow Gang" The identities of other people also blur and change: Bo's abducted date who soon becomes ' l'!' 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''' I ' Aft4 : 4 4 !Pri 2 i: ' 1 - ii' ':::'5': ) 1 - i t tiV N ''''' 11 ' j I - 1 10- i - ! i ' 1 '' - '''' ' ' P - Dutch's moll is first called Lola but turns out to be a society woman named Drew Prentiss 20 years old and conveniently married to a complaisant homosexual Later still she turns out to be a reckless alcoholic ("Every night of my life I am a damn drunk") whose initiatory affair with Billy risks getting both of them killed As Billy reflects "she lived an enlarged existence it was not her nature to be contained by judgments" and later he has to protect her from her own fearlessness Billy himself is arbitrarily named after Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx when Dutch facing trial on a tax charge gets a change of venue moves to upstate Onondaga converts to Catholicism and enrolls Billy in church school under that name — all as part of a successful campaign to adopt a more benign image in the eyes of prospective jurors In a sense Billy's experience is simply adolescence intensified writ larger and more dangerous in which misreading an adult's signal can be fatal Billy understands that "this was not like mothers and fathers of it was not a ordinary existence it universe of love they lived in was a large empty resounding adulthood booming with terror" By the same token Dutch's career can be seen as a metaphor of the whole American experience in which transplanted Europeans improvise a civilization on a dangerous new continent and in a vacuum of values where the old rules either don't apply or have lost enough force to be disregarded and where no one's self has to be considered as being frozen in its final form Finally the book is the latest installment — and one of the richest in texture most urgently plotted and tightly structured — in Doczorow's subversive history of the United ZEtibunt his Bo-di- — Billy Bathgate 7 -- )t --fs 4410' ' ! 4 4 ' r ttmosoatilk 1 it mtorkt I vre'4 I s 41iii c 00 of L411 :4 t 2!thot C ' I 4 74 ' EL Doetorow author of Billy BallIgate was a visiting faculty member at the University of Utah in the summer of 1971 ohe that so far covers the in the late 19th century (Welcome to Hard Times) New York City and environs from the 1890s through the 1920s (Ragtime) family life in New York City in the '30s (World's Fair) criminal life in the city and upstate New York during the same decade (Billy Bathgate) the Adirondacks and the Midwest in the late '30s and early '40s (Loon Lake) and native radical activism from the Old Left '50s through the New Left '60s (The Book of Daniel) Like Huck Finn Billy Bathgate returns to childhood at the end of his States frontier book but his reasons are much different: It is not because he is still basically a child as Huck is but because he is an adult who wants to keep the fortune he has amassed from Dutch's assassination The details of the book's climax and denouement are much too rich and Dickensian to spoil by disclosure in a review but it should surprise no one that Dutch's loot founds "a corporate enterprise that goes on to this day" — another American empire that began in banditry and ends in — cagey respectability Joseph Coates Chicago Tribune Pain sometimes unbearable in Margaret Atwood's new novel Cat's Eye then there is nothing to feel With Atwood there is plenty to feel She can be as subtle and complex as Beatty and Didion her contemporaries but she is less civilized What follows the dissection of pain in this Canadian writer is not depression but rage After the scalpel comes the ax Atwood's books are punishing and but is not the end of it The end is war and a flash of There is a battle-glea- Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood Doubleday 446 pp $1895 Women's pain in this day and age and North America is Margaret Atwocd's subject That by itself would be nothing to remark on Look at the galaxy of talented Americans who write of it with an ear so perfect at absorption that only silence remains and with a nuance so honed that as with the legendary warrior's sword you feel nothing until you notice your head is lying beside you and Best Sellers Mom 2 Blind Pan McGinnis 3 A Met History or time Hawking 4 Oracle Burns & Arst Joke& Teoswan 6 The illooaing Warnbaugh 7 The Last Dom Manchester & Parting Me Waters Branch It What Do You Cum What Other People Think? 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' n MI1 NOW 40(Yo NI 1 '''' 7 ‘'t agent of harm Atwood is in no way turning her back on feminism The spite of Elaine's playmates is a poison distilled from a 1940s adult' world where women in contrast to Elaine's floating family are ill from frustrating confinement But the powel of Cat's Eye is not mainly ideological It is in the stunning portrait of pain inflicted and of the disability that freezes the protagonist's life ever after Elaine is courageous witty and disarmingly open Her anger flares totally ventilated She is afflicted — terribly — but never corrupted Elaine's life as an art student in Toronto which is a major portion of the book is told in fairly humdrum fashion Her return set in the present is far more alive its energy boosted by her effort to remember her past and come to terms with it Elaine's injury weakens her and distances her perceptions that is the point This in turn makes the book tend to run slow and cold almost all of it seems to take place in winter Even more than a novelist Atwood is a poet She conceives Elaine with a poet's transforming fire: and delivers her to us that way a flame inside an icicif — Richard Eder The 16s Angeles Thne '''''N ob 1' DESIGN : ''' '' CA yd Emmittimili - Although female malevolence rather than male domination is the I HO ' ' 1 ili toottion"1 7 S3 - : il - -- '' I - - T clothes she even worries what the woman bartender at the opening will think of her oel I 7 Since 1946 the ones to trust 4117 AND k I i ) d ' WINDOW Sears-Roebuc- life-bloo- - (white & off white) $998 From The women and this is the book's dark heart are three girls It is they who initiate Elaine into an idea of what it means to be a woman and they do it with appalling cruelty For her first eight years Elaine had been innocent of the knowledge She and her brother lived a nomadic life traveling about Canada with their parents Her father was a research entomologist who took his family along as he wandered the north woods gathering specimens Until he became a professor and they moved to Toronto Elaine's life was camping tourist cabins correspondence lessons given by her mother and gathering In a grubby uncomfortable way it was a gender-fre- e Utopia a pure life of the mind with two parents who were kind innocent and dangerously abstract In Toronto the gypsy family works conscientiously and incompetently On curtains and carpets and shoptomboy ping And the falls into the hands of three travesties of girlhood It is clothes and tea parties and an aping of their mothers They make scrapbooks from a Canadian equivalent of the catalog They cut out pictures of dresses cosmetic sets and appliances each politely assuring th? others that their scrapbooks are better k Febii-tlizr- ii Here for a taste of Atwood's angelic sharpness is the mystified tomboy: "I can see that there's a whole world of girls" she reflects "all I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's catalog with embroidery scissors and say I've done it badly" She tries for enthusiasm at her d Led by age friends are Cordelia the imperious upper-clas- s the trio takes her warmly in Far better if they had excluded her Their project ostensibly is to teach her the manners graces and tastes that they've been brought up to Their real project is to have a victim someone they can ostracize correct demean and — occasionally to be nice to It complete the torment is a primal feeding frenzy worthy of Lord of the Flies Eventually after one punishment nearly turns fatal the spell is broken Almost overnight Elaine turns away from them But the damage has been done More than a man could — the men in Cat's Eye are a mixed lot but none is lethal — they have foreclosed Elaine's ability to form a bond with other women to draw strength from them and above all to develop a sense of her own woman's worth The damage is irreparable Even at 50 a minor celebrity Elaine remains in terror of the chic woman gallery owner and an assured arts interviewe r She dread!: their opinion of her talent her looks and her that of anguish : i Reg 19" yd NOW - 15 iliTir()NF yol ''' Stardust Antique Satin i 86 ant Drap'eries I' EtaFtr4d reçefve Installatt9n 71 -- : i I 19 with the tvlarttl th of ii I 1I (D Brghten i 2 5 7 - - 20 a iCopynght1 I TIO 15 13 6 Leighton & Legends Des and ChistisMd Berths or Arneican Piston JO Shenkrnan o Advice MiseeNanteus Pus bast Week Week 2 I Wealth Without Risk GIVOn3 2 The Cholestemi Cum Kowalski 2 Dictionary of Cultural Literacy 4 Hirsch 4 Weaster's New Wand Dishonor' 3 Simon Schustei S the Frugal Gourmet Cooks 2 ' American -- - I ulgttum 5 45 1 3 4 scarlet in her fields of desolation The Handmaid's Tale a dystopian novel of a society where women are brutally suppressed can be grim reading but through it run Atwood's vigor and biting elegance Her new novel Cat's Eye is grimmer still The pain is sometimes unbearable It distorts the book in part and it brings it to a halt that is troubling But it is very far from stasis The narrator-protagonistands rigid in her wounds in the stillness the thud of her heartbeat goes on not yielding and not hoping We meet Elaine in her 50s She is a painter who has achieved some success though in the patronizing category of feminist artist It is a prison for her and as we will see a fearfully ironic one It is no far reach to think of Atwood's own classification as a feminist novelist The irony is that Elaine who has come back to Toronto where she was reared for a retrospective of her work — and it turns out to reflect upon her life — is emotionally crippled but not by men Women have done the damage a harm that has left her so deprived that she holds her entire life as she lives it and thinks back on it at an icy distance Whatever reaches her even the good things — she has her painting a decent second marriage two flourishing daughters — must cross a frontier post where the currency of pleasure is exchanged for 01- 1 - 1 4 A Featured on television Stephen Moody Photographer 240 South 200 East i)) SALT LAKE CITY UTAH 84111 Fri Customer Parktng |
