Fans of the work of E.L. Doctorow usually fall into two groups, those who think The Book of Daniel is his best work and those who lean toward Ragtime. His latest, Billy Bathgate (Random House, $19.95), proves them both wrong.
An anonymous hero from the Bathgate section of the New York City borough of the Bronx starts out as a kid who juggles—"capable-boy, capable-boy"—and uses his manipulative skills to become the youngest member of the Dutch Schultz gang: that’s the bare story. But the plot takes us through an older series of actions, an initiation into adult society that includes sex, murder, duplicity, and even joy, all of this told against the perfectly recreated society of the early nineteen thirties, and in the most precise and yet luminous prose that any American writer has produced in a long time. Doctorow’s best—and one of ours.
Another of our finest writers, Saul Bellow, has just come out with a new book, in this case a 109 page novella called The Theft (Penguin, $6.95). It’s mellow Bellow—the first time he has chosen to use a woman as his main character, and in the case of Clara Velde, a big woman nearly as large as some of Bellow’s earlier Big Men such as Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. Except that she’s got a soft spot for an old lover, a Washington wheeler dealer named Ithiel "Teddy" Regler, who makes her success as a publishing executive and four-time married woman of the world seem a diminished thing. Teddy gave her an emerald ring some years back. The plot turns on the theft of this old gift. A pleasing, if brief, diversion of some value, with ideas about the uses of psychiatry, international politics. child abuse, culture, love, the Bellow watermark that you can always see when you hold his best pages up to the light.
