I don't remember a lot about the plot of this book. The strength was the hurried pace of the gritty writing and the characters. ( )

The poor of the Bronx during the Depression had it bad. So bad that Dutch Schultz just may give a young boy a break. Our protagonist Billy Bathgate starts under the gangster's wicked ways. Little Billy grows up towards his destiny, and his triumph.

Billy Bathgate is the story of a 15 year old East Bronx kid becoming involved in a very sterotypical portrayal of the New York mob. At first I enjoyed the run on sentences that seemed to sound like a poorly educated street kid, but then Doctorow loses that tone. It is as if he needs to wield some impressive author vocab acrobatics every now and again so the voice of the kid is lost. Example: "I felt as if I was descending into a pore of the planet, and then I came around a bend and was looking down at a cantilevered ledge shaped like an enormous arrowhead"
In the end the reader learns that Billy Bathgate is telling the story years later after a very good education. Without knowing this in the beginning the Bronx tone mixed with the Ivy League language is disjointed and pulled me away from the story.

However, without Doctorow's way with language and character development this would be a boring cartoonish crime/mob novel. ( )

This book is an interesting peek into the lives of gangsters in 1930's New York. Billy Bathgate was born in the Bronx slums, living a fatherless and reckless life, until he is befriended by famous gangster, Dutch Schultz. Schultz shows him the inner workings of crime, killing, gambling and bootlegging. Billy latches on to this less-than-admirable life as way to scratch some type of existence for his insane mother and himself. An opportunist and a quick study, Billy seems to be numb to the unethical lifestyle of a gangster. That is, until he falls in love with Schultz's girlfriend.

I doubt few could argue Doctorow's brilliance as a writer. Even with a neatly tied-up ending, his story about a young boy, love and relationships transports you to the very setting of the story. Admittedly, I was thrown off by the many run-on sentences and stream of consciousness writing style, but I believe it was a necessary literary trick used by Doctorow to make you feel like you knew exactly what Billy is thinking.

Like Ragtime, this novel is a snapshot of the lives of people living our American history. When you finish Billy Bathgate, you will have a better understanding of the Great Depression, Prohibition and the economic impacts of the 1930's. If you like historical fiction mixed with a social commentary, then you may find Billy Bathgate to be a good selection for you. ( )

I have to say, as a first-time reader of Doctorow, I picked up Billy Bathgate expecting your typical gangster novel. Guns, molls, bullets, blood, etc. What I found was a really sweet story about a kid who falls in love with Dutch Schultz's girlfriend and ends up saving her life. That's the spine of the novel. That's it's heart. There's a lot of exciting, wonderful things mixed in there, but that's the story. And it is absolutley beautiful and stirring.

Personally, I don't think I will ever forget Billy Bathgate. He is too engaging to be forgotten, too understandable, human, and too deserving of just the right amounts of sympathy and exasperation. His narrative invokes memories of Holden Caulfield, Nick Carraway, and strangely enough, Dr. Watson.

Doctorow peppers his text with delightful run-ons, sentence fragments, and old-fashioned American profanity. I say delightful because all three of these classic no-no's are incorporated perfectly into the words coming out of Billy's mouth and from his memory. Perfect grammar would be undesirable in this case, because Billy thinks in fragments and acts in run-ons. I think we would miss out on half of his personality and being if he didn't come across as a boy made out of the broken pieces of one big, dangling participle. Don't let reviews dissing the grammar deter you from reading this book, I suppose I'm trying to say. The imagery is beautiful, the descriptions (especially of people, but also of places, smells, buildings, scenes,) are sheer perfection. They hit the nail on the head. Sit back and watch the mental movie your mind will unfold for you.

I know it seems odd to refer to a "gangster" novel as "beautiful," but Billy Bathgate is just that. Gorgeous imagery, writing more poetry than prose, with beautiful human touches that stand outside the storyline itself, much like Nabokov's work.

This is one of those books that will give you End-Of-Book-Withdrawal. ( )