Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
Juggler's Code
By Garry Wills
Billy Bathgate
by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 323 pp., $19.95
In sentences with nicely clutched transmissions, a long limousine runs, one night in 1935, onto a New York pier, where it smoothly transfers its human cargo to a short tugboat. A boy of fifteen, leaping by impulse onto the boat, is about to undergo the crucial event of his life. He will watch a man die in the muted ritual of one of Dutch Schultz's 'necessary business murders.' The gangster is going to kill one of his own hired killers, Bo Weinberg. Billy, the boy looking down from the boat's rail, sees 'a lighted pucker of green angry water.' Schultz, entering the cabin below him, has turned on its light. Going inside himself, he watches preparations for the murder by 'the almost-green shards of one work light.' It is more frightening to be thrown about on a vibrating boat than to lie in the sand at night, like Nick Carraway, thinking of the green light that beckoned Gatsby over the water. Nick, already an adult, meets a Gatsby who has covered up his criminal past. Billy, a streetwise boy but still a boy, meets Dutch Schultz at the height of his lawlessness. Yet Billy is in some ways less dazzled than Nick by the glamour of the man beyond rules.
Review, 2611 words
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