“So glad I read my first Doctorow, and I now see why he's so respected and loved as an author. His descriptions of New York in the 1930s seem so real, and the characters, including the lovely, alcoholic, Drew Preston. She reminds me of Hemingway's Brett Ashley.
His sex scenes didn't ring true for me, or at least some parts, but that's a small criticism. Overall I had the feeling I was in the hands of a master and especially at the end with his surprising, and pleasing, results. How he tells enough, but not too much. I can sense the sentences and paragraphs that were cut, and it was good to do it. He ends with art.
Billy Bathgate
October 02011
Read for my book group, my first Doctorow, and now I see why he is so often mentioned as one of our great American writers. Up there with Cormac McCarthy, Pat Conroy, Larry McMurtry (the ones I have read and admire so).
Read it on my iPad, but have the hardcover.
After reading the book, I watched the movie (with Wayne, who was visiting that night). While it had top-flight actors and the acting was good, the movie was deeply disappointing because of the script. It left out two key plot elements, which were two of the most charming, endearing elements of the whole book. This makes me guess that the movie’s poor reviews are likely due to this—the people had read the book and found the movie so utterly lacking. A prime example of the movie being so much weaker than the book. Did it have to be so? I’d like to think not.
Book highlights:
Best ever descriptions of the power of handguns—as non-neutral devices that evoke human rage. “And then it happens, you understand that if you don’t make it yours you are dead, you have created the circumstance, but it has its own free-standing rage.”
“I will never forget how it felt to hold a loaded gun for the first time and lift it and fire it, the scare of its animate kick up the bone of your arm, you are empowered...”
A coming of age novel, great descriptions of the desperation of poverty in New York, The Bronx, at the period whey my father was a boy. Of the thirst for escape, for a life out of there—even if it was illegal.
The fantasic character of Dutch Schultz, as the last of the lone gangsters, a great, Shakespearian siloquoy near the end when he explains his independent nature, that he could never cooperate with other gangsters and thus was obsolete for the next era. “I have worked hard. And how I got where I got is I do what I want, not what other people want.” Etc.
And the captivating Drew Preston, a figure like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley. “Because every night of my life I am
damn drunk,” she admits to Billy.
Billy’s heroic discharge of his assignment to protect her—against the odds to the extreme, and poetic. Actually this scene was well done in the movie.
“I was apprenticed to a gangster and so was being educated in Bible studies.” Marty at our book group says this reference may have come from the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, where the character is apprenticed to a pirate, which was a mistake. He was supposed to be apprenticed to a pilot, but his mother was misheard.
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