Word: doctorow
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...think [about] how fast the mind can move us, the way the story is a span of light across space," says Billy Bathgate, the 15-year-old gangster apprentice who is the title character of E.L. Doctorow's newest work. And appropriately for a novel that mellifluously combines historical fact and invention, Billy Bathgate is itself a transporting medium...
...Doctorow...
...Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting. The plot is merely serviceable and the cast of characters sprawling rather than sharply defined, but the machine...
Another short-changing of literature and life to which Epstein object is ideology at either the heart of a novel or the core of criticism. Borrowing Clauswitz's definition of war, he accuses Doctorow and Coover of using literature to wage "politics by other means." He devotes four essays to rehabilitating the reputations of James G. Cozzens, John Dos Passo Var. Wyck Brooks, and Willa Cather, all of whom be considers unjustly neglected by the prejudice of liberal critics. Cather he "rescues" from the crown of lesbianism...
...reality, of course, is that Doctorow is writing, telling prickly truths, getting a life down on the page. The result is totally shapeless, but it is also funny and full of juice. It is interesting to note that John Updike, in his Bech chronicles, Philip Roth, in his Zuckerman books, and now Doctorow have written some of their best recent work about the impossibility of writing. Writers, it seems certain, will outsurvive cockroaches, no matter what toxins they spray on themselves. -By John Skow