Word: doctorow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...something truly weird. These gothic, melodramatic flourishes appear not in the first chapter of the latest Stephen King novel but rather in E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks (Random House; 253 pages; $23). This is not entirely unexpected. The author of such luminous page turners as Ragtime, World's Fair and Billy Bathgate has made it a habit to surprise his readers with each new book. His central concerns -- the unavoidable sway of historical forces, the insidious effects of the powerful upon the powerless -- have remained constant, but he has chosen a variety of fictional voices and techniques to bring them...
This claim is asserted but never convincingly shown. The shocking, Poe-like tale at the center of the novel does not achieve the emblematic significance that Doctorow wishes it to have. It is simply too bizarre to stand for -- or comment on -- anything outside itself, particularly the entire City of New York and what McIlvaine calls its "roiling soul, twisting and turning over on itself, forming and re-forming ..." The Waterworks is at its best when Doctorow stops McIlvaine's huffing and puffing about social significance and lets him get on with the business of telling an entertaining and sometimes...
BILLY BATHGATE. Over budget and over schedule, with rumors of rancor soiling its production, Robert Benton's movie of the E.L. Doctorow novel arrives in a shroud of doom. Well, surprise! There's rare grace and gravity in the tale of a Bronx kid (Loren Dean, a find) who hitches his hopes to the falling star of gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman, again splendid). Forget the Cassandras. Go see a good movie...
...hurt that gate was in the title. Watergate. Heaven's Gate. Billy Bathgate. As the production of E.L. Doctorow's best seller went over budget and reportedly out of whack, bathgate is what Hollywood figured the Disney studio would take -- in red ink -- when the film finally opened. Its summer premiere was postponed; last month a new ending was shot (then discarded); stories surfaced of clashes between director Robert Benton and his star, Dustin Hoffman. Oh, and Bruce Willis was in it, so it must...
...trick of Doctorow's novel -- a meditation on '30s Mob boss Dutch Schultz -- was in its narrative voice. Young Billy, from Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, was the ideal observer: a talisman for the gang, a kind of underworld groupie who is appreciative of their style and implicated in their actions but still one ironic step outside their souls, and who is ready to analyze every movement and moment in 484 pages of headlong streetwise orotundity and subordinate clauses even longer than this one. Tom Stoppard's script daringly dumps that voice (there is no voice-over narration) and puts...