Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Darman's negotiations with Congress present serpentine challenges worthy of a Kafka plot, his personality has the dense texturing of a protagonist in a Nabokov novel. Contradictions little and large adorn his life. He owns two racehorses but never bets on them because he doesn't gamble. Last year when his aged Audi expired, he agonized for weeks before acquiring a new Mercedes- Benz. The symbolism of so expensive a car bothers this man of independent means who cuts his own hair (badly) because "it's cheaper and faster." With a reporter he knows well, he can be drawn into...
...next decade he supported himself in London by writing advertising copy. He wed a British woman and fathered a son. (That union ended in divorce in 1987; Rushdie is now married to the American author Marianne Wiggins.) His first novel, Grimus (1974), was a critical and commercial flop, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit: that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted...
Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), was another roistering allegory, this time refracting recent events in Pakistan. It too was nominated for the Booker Prize, but at the presentation dinner the award went to another contender. Rushdie raised eyebrows by standing up and protesting the injustice of the decision. "The thing about Salman," says an editor who knows him, "is that if he won the Nobel Prize, he would not be happy until he had won it twice...
Near the end, the narrator of this riveting novel refers to all that has gone before as "this story of a boy's adventures." Some boy. Some adventures. Both are as far as they could be from innocent visions of Tom Sawyer or Horatio Alger. Even discounting a particularly bloody penultimate encounter, Billy Bathgate directly witnesses two murders and helps dispose of the body of a third victim. In each case, the perpetrator is the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz, ne Arthur Flegenheimer, Billy's self-described "mentor" and as romantically dangerous a father figure as any lad could desire. Billy...
Those who have followed E.L. Doctorow's career -- a considerable number, judging from the commercial and critical successes of previous books -- will find much in Billy Bathgate that feels, initially, familiar. As in Ragtime (1975), this novel mingles fictional characters with historical ones: Schultz, Walter Winchell, Thomas E. Dewey. The setting combines Depression seediness and underworld glamour in a manner reminiscent of Loon Lake (1980). And this is not the first time Doctorow has written about a boy's coming of age in the Bronx; he did so in World's Fair (1985), even giving its made-up hero...