Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...only is Doctorow's novel a welltold story, but it also has a poetic quality that barely misses overdescription. In one scene, Doctorow depicts a Bronx market, with "every one of the merchants competing with the same oranges and apples and tangerines and peaches and plums for the same prices," and where merchants shout out their prices. "They called Missus, look, I got the best, feel this grapefruit, fresh Georgia peaches just in. They talked they cajoled and the women shopping talked back...
Billy is by no means omniscient--that would destroy the credibility of the novel--but he is aware and lucky. These attributes give him his place in the gang...
More like an expanded Andy Rooney monologue than a novel, The Mezzanine shows that the seemingly inconsequential details of life are actually universal...
Winner of the race to print is Susan Brownmiller, whose novel Waverly Place (Grove; $18.95), published this week, was completed long before the verdict came in. In this fictive version of events leading to Lisa's death, Nussbaum (thinly masked as Judith Winograd) is programmed for catastrophe. Her childhood begins with abuse: "Whack. Where were you? Whack. Ma, I got lost. Whack. I told you . . . always to come straight home. Whack...