Billy Bathgate (Doctorow)

Billy Bathgate
E.L. Doctorow, 1989
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812981179 


Summary
In 1930's New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old highschool dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering.

The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz's girlfriend.

Relive this story through the title character's driving narrative, a child's thoughts and feelings filtered through the sensibilities of an adult, and the result is E.L. Doctorow's most convincing and appealing portrayal of a young boy's life. Converging mythology and history, one of America's most admired authors has captured the romance of gangsters and criminal enterprise that continues to fascinate the American psyche today. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 6, 1931
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Kenyon College; Columbia University
• Awards—3 National book Critics Circle Awards; National
   Book Aware; PEN/Faulkner Award
• Currently—lives in the New York City area

E. L. Doctorow, one of America's preeminent authors, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times), the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation For Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published a volume of selected essays Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, and a play, Drinks Before Dinner, which was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival. (From the publisher.)

More
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author whose critically acclaimed and award-winning fiction ranges through his country’s social history from the Civil War to the present. Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”

Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied with the poet and New Critic, John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in Philosophy. After graduating with Honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English Drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army of Occupation in Germany in 1954-55 as a corporal in the signal corps.

He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as a serious reclamation of the genre before he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.

Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama student, Helen Setzer, while in Germany and by the time he had moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an editor at the New American Library, (NAL) a mass market paperback publisher, he was the father of three children. To support his family he would spend nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, and then, in 1964 as Editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, publishing work by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy, among others.

In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Published in 1971 it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers" according to the New York Times.

Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since accounted one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library Editorial Board.

Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award winning novels World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), The March (2005) and Homer and Langley (2010); two volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of selected essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993) and Creationists (2006). He is published in over thirty languages. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A wonderful addition to the ranks of American boy heroes...Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with more poetry, Holden Caulfield with more zest and spirit.... The kind of book you find yourself finishing at three in the morning after promising at midnight that you’ll stop at the next page.
New York Times


The astonishing story of Billy's apprenticeship to Shultz and his education at the hands of the mobster's minions is related by Doctorow with masterful skill, grace and lucidity of prose, inspired inventiveness of scene and true-voiced dialogue. Equally a rollicking adventure and a cautionary tale, both parable of the prodigal son and poignant coming-of-age story, it is mesmerizing reading that soars from the shocking first scene of a gangland execution through episodes of horror, hilarity and sudden, deepening insights. In his odyssey, Billy will learn about human nature as well as extortion and policy rackets; he will travel to the upstate rural community of Onandaga where Schultz will be brought to trial by special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey; he will be exposed to the world of Park Avenue socialites; he will acquire a gun and better manners; he will discover that the "glamor and class'' of a big-time racketeer is achieved through good business methods as well as violence; he will comprehend the seamy relationship between criminals and politicians, and he will fall in love.

Perhaps the most affecting example of the dichotomy that rules his life occurs when, after having witnessed the most vicious brutalities, he returns to the Bronx and goes shopping with his mother for his first suit. In this stunning, lyrical novel, Doctorow has perfected the narrative voice of a lower-class boy encountering the world (surpassing those of the protagonists of Ragtime, Loon Lake and World's Fair ). He falters only in a sentimental, almost fairytale ending that belies the harsh realities by which the narrative is propelled. But so fine and convincing is this story that the reader accepts in its entirety Doctorow's mythical vision, a dark version of the Horatio Alger fable related with a brilliant twist.
Publishers Weekly


Having grown up poor but ambitious on the Bronx's Bathgate Avenue during the Depression, young Billy is now being educated in the ways of the world. But his is no ordinary education, for Billy is a gangster-in-training employed by the notorious Dutch Schultz. As the story moves fluidly from the violent underworld of New York City to the playgrounds of the rich, Billy falls for "the Dutchman's" latest lady—a beauty named Drew Preston who eventually reciprocates his youthful passion. Soon Billy is questioning the actions of the mob he was so eager to join as he seeks to protect Drew from its vengeance. Though at times 15-year-old Billy seems far too precocious, even for a streetwise punk, ultimately we are made to feel his apprehension of the world: that "large, empty resounding adulthood booming with terror." An engrossing tale that successfully re-creates worlds gone by in loving and meticulous detail. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Billy Bathgate has been described as “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with more poetry, Holden Caulfield with more zest and spirit” (New York Times Book Review). How would you describe Billy? How is he like—or unlike—Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Holden Caulfield?

2. Trace Billy’s evolution—from Billy Behan, a poor kid living in the Bronx, to Billy Bathgate, a street smart, gun-toting member of Dutch Schultz’s infamous gang. How does Billy change? In what ways does he stay the same?

3. In Billy Bathgate, our setting is New York in the 1930s. Discuss the Bronx, Manhattan, Onondaga, Saratoga, and New Jersey, as seen through Doctorow’s—and Billy’s—eyes.

4. Circumstance and fate play large roles in the novel. Of his chance meeting with Dutch, Billy says, “I couldn’t have been planning to juggle continuously every day of my idling life until Mr. Schultz arrived, it had just happened. But now that it had I saw it as destiny. The world worked by chance but every chance had a prophetic heft to it” (29). Discuss this quote in the context of Dutch and Billy’s introduction, and also throughout the course of the novel. Do you think Billy’s success was based on circumstance and fate? Or was it something more?

5. Early in their relationship, Dutch calls Billy his “good-luck kid” (57). But by the end of the novel, Billy realizes “I didn’t know him when he had a handle on things and everything was as he wanted it to be.... [Dutch] had risen and he was falling. And the Dutchman’s life with me was his downfall” (280-281). Is Billy right about Dutch? Did Billy bring him any good luck? Or did Dutch bring more good luck to Billy’s life?

6. Discuss Billy and Dutch’s relationship over the course of the novel. Why did Dutch take on Billy? Why did Billy stay loyal to Dutch? What did both gain—or lose—from their relationship?

7. Similarly, talk about Billy’s relationship with Otto Berman. What does Billy learn from him? In the end, do you think Billy felt closer to Dutch or Otto? Discuss your reasoning.

8. Before falling for Drew, Billy considers Rebecca, a girl he once paid for sex, his girlfriend. How does his relationship with Becky change, and what does it say about Billy’s personal evolution? Think about this quote, from the night of Billy’s neighborhood party, as you discuss: “I reflected as I lay there that my life was changing more quickly and in more ways than I could keep up with. Or was it all just one thing, as if everything had the same charge to it, so that if I was remade to Mr. Schultz’s touch, Becky was remade to mine, and there was only one infinitely extending flash of conformation” (102).

9. Billy seems to struggle with finding his place in Dutch’s gang—and the world. Upon arriving in a posh hotel in Onondaga, he says, “I loved this luxury” (117) and throughout the story he is attracted to the glitz and glamour that comes with being part of Dutch’s group. But then he thinks, “The only thing that cheered me up was the sight of a cockroach walking up the wall...because then I knew The Onondaga Hotel was not all it was cracked up to be” (119). Talk about these conflicting impressions and what they say about Billy as a character.

10. Drew (or Lola or Mrs. Preston) has tremendous influence on Billy throughout the course of the novel. Discuss the evolution of their relationship—from mother/son to charge/custodian to lover. Do you think Billy truly loved Drew? Did she love him? What about Dutch? Discuss Drew’s relationship with him.

11. Of Drew, Billy says: “She’s not after anything, she’s not naturally afraid like most girls you’d meet or jealous or any of that. She does whatever she wants, and then she gets bored and then she does something else” (242). Is this accurate? Why or why not?

12. Billy continuously proves his loyalty to Dutch, and though he thinks of leaving the gang at one point, he quickly dismisses it: “I knew I would do nothing of the kind...life held no grandeur for a simple thief, I had not gotten this far and whoever had hung this charm over my life had not chosen me because I was a cowardly double-crosser” (271). Why doesn’t he cut his losses and run? Is he afraid of Dutch? Is he just fiercely loyal? Or is it something else?

13. Billy survives—both with the gang and with his life in the end of the novel—because he is loyal, he makes smart choices, and he’s adaptable. He thinks: “When the situation changed, would I change with it? Yes, the answer was always yes. And that gave me the idea that maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations” (138). Discuss this quote in the context of the novel. Does it ring true for Billy? Does it hold any meaning for your life?

14. At the end of the novel, we learn that Billy, an adult, has been telling the story of his teenage self. He reflects: “I find some consolation...in having told here the truth about everything of my life with Dutch Schultz.... I have told the truth of what I have told in the words and the truth of what I have not told which resides in the words” (321). What are we to make of that? Have we heard the whole truth? What is gained—or lost—by Billy as an adult telling the story of Billy as a teenager? Why do you think Doctorow chose to tell his story in this way?

15. At the end of Billy Bathgate, we learn that Billy finished high school, went on to an Ivy League college, became a second lieutenant in the Army and is a man of a “certain renown” (321). And to top it all off, he had a son with Drew, who is delivered to his doorstep a year after they have stopped speaking. Where you surprised with the end of Billy’s story? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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