Billy Bathgate.

Billy Bathgate, by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, 323 pp., $19.95)

IT WAS THE Modernists who first taught us-the Post-Modernists continue the instruction-that writing, to qualify as literature, must be by bourgeois standards unreadable. In this assumption they were-they are-wrong. There is no reason at all why an honest and skillfully constructed book should not be pleasing to what Regina O'Connor (mother of Flannery) called "a lot-a lot!" of people, as well as respectable in the eyes of competent literary critics. Before the advent of Modernism, the appearance of such books was a fairly regular occurrence. Raymond Chandler wrote: "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. . . . Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius." Hence there is no reasontheoretically speaking-why Billy Bathgate, a wildly acclaimed novel by a man who has made a great deal of money writing novels, should not be literature in the sense in which Chandler understood the word. No reason, that is, except that this particular novelist happens to be E. L. Doctorow.

It is a long time since I have looked at a novel so shamelessly commercial in general intent and so tediously pretentious in execution; so ineffably vulgar and so insufferably boring, to the point where turning over the page becomes, after the first thirty, a daunting, indeed almost impossible, chore. The story-the peregrination of a "capable" boy who puts his talents as a juggler in service to Dutch Schultz, the New York hoodlum of the Depression era, a time when, "as bad as things were, America was a big juggling act and . . . we could all be kept up in the air somehow"-is freighted with possibility, which goes, nevertheless, substantially unrealized. Intensity in anything is just what is not characteristic of Billy Bathgate, where Mr. Doctorow is writing almost entirely out of control most of the way through this narrative of 323 pages, from any one of which the only satisfactory hook would be one thrown instantly ahead for the last.

In Belly Bathgate Mr. Doctorow exhibits a lot of problems no novelist needs, the most radical of them a problem with language in general and with diction in particular. If Billy were not described in the flap copy as "an urban Tom Sawyer," I probably would have made nothing of the fact that he has a girlfriend named Becky and that he belongs to a gang (of which he is not, however, the organizer but merely the coffee-gofer). The truth is, Billy Bathgate is not a character in this book at all: he is the author, trying with desperate ineptitude to make a novel. Whether because Billy is simply an insufficiently imagined personality, or because Doctorow was incapable of fashioning a narrative technique appropriate to his book, or both, the protagonist's first-person voice remains from start to finish a ludicrously discordant melange of disparate levels of tone and language. Doctorow seems to have wanted to achieve a modernistic overvoice, combining idiomatic streetwise talk with the idealized speech of the contemplative psyche. Instead, he has produced a tortuous arrangement -or non-arrangement-of run-on sentences created by the simplistic expedient of substituting commas where end-stops should go, all of it compromised beyond hope by stilted literary usage bumping up against what we are invited to accept as the dialect of 1930s gangsterdom (there is more of the recognizable idiom of the underworld of that period in a single paragraph by Chandler than in the whole of Bathgate), while point of view is abandoned to fluctuate wildly between that of the barefoot boy of the slums and the urban sophisticate. Thus Doctorow, plugging Billy into his Barefoot Gangster mode, does not neglect to have him snarl, "the f-----s," from time to time, or to remark that something or another is "a real son of a bitch." In between, we get "literary" passages like this one: So there we are, three o'clock in the morning and tearing up Route 22 out of the city, miles into the mountains where I have never been beforr, I am sitting up front next to Mickey the driver, and Mr. Schultz and the lady are in the back with glasses of champagne in their hands. . . . It has been a long night in my education, but there is more to come, I am going into mountains, Mr. Schultz is showing me the world, he is a subscription to the National Geographic Magazine except the only tits I've seen are white, I've seen the contours of the ocean bed and the contours of the white Miss Drew and now I see the contours of the black mountains. I understand for the first time the place of the city in the world, it should have been obvious but I had never realized it . . . it is a station on the amphibian journey, it is where we come out sliming, it is where we bask and feed and make our tracks and do our dances and leave our coprolitic [!] spires, before moving, on into tbe black mountains of high winds and no rain. And what I hear . . . is . . . the tires' humslick on the damp highway . . . all of it really the protesting circuitry of my brain.

In the final pages of tbe novel we are told that Billy, after abandoning the criminal milieu, attended an Ivy League college, where, presumably, he learned to use words such as "coprolitic," but this bit of information, if it is an explanation at all, is purely a sociological one; certainly it provides no sort of artistic justification for the foregoing passage.

Finally, Doctorow's difficulties with language and character prove to be inextricable from one another. Here, for example, is an exchange between an upper-class couple in their luxurious apartment in a Fifth Avenue residence hotel:

"I speak of order, of the need for some order," the fellow Harvey said, although clearly without hope of prevailing. "You're going to destroy us all," he muttered. "I mean a bit of scandal is not the point, is it? You're a very clever, very naughty little hellion, but there are limits, my darling, there really are. You're going to get in over your head and then what will you do? Wait for me to come to the rescue?"

"That is a laugh and a half."

And here is Dutch himself speaking:

"Goddamnit counselor what do I pay you for! . . . All you have to do is make the deal, it's very simple isn't it, a simple deal, all this legal bullshit you're giving me, why can't you just do what you're supposed to do and stop dicking me, I'm dying here, I could go to law school myself and pass the bar in every state of the union waiting for you to move your ass."

Not the least of a multitude of reasons for the failure of Billy Bathgate is Doctorow's own failure to demonstrate in Mr. Schultz the kind of charisma necessary to bring a star-struck boy of 15 to him in the first place. (At least the flap copy doesn't instruct me to look for parallels in the ambiguous relationship between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby-or Gatz.)

Nor does language-his languagecome to the aid of Mr. Doctorow as he attempts the construction of a scene; time after time, good dramatic materials are squandered, dribbled away, beneath avalanches of appalling rhetoric, run-on sentences, false poetry, and fake gusto. Doctorow does not know how to use words to create tensions, patterns of force, and he has a fish's eye for what Ezra Pound called the Luminous Detail (even in History, shards of which he scatters inartistically across his literary wasteland). "Poetry," Hugh Kenner has remarked, "walk[s] on the borders of the nonsensical." To which insight, I guess, we owe the following:

But as I say it was a kind of enlistment, I had walked in and signed up. And the first thing you learn is there are no ordinary rules of the night and day, there are just different kinds of light, granules of degree, and so no reason to have more or less to do in one than in another. The blackest quietest hour was only a kind of light.

The second half of the novel is perceptibly better than the first, but the conclusion in which Billy, having accepted his child (by Schultz's former mistress) in a basket from the hands of the lady's chauffeur ("and I didn't know what I thought it was, laundry or something"), is able to recreate the family his father abandoned, and in the process to cure his poor mad mother-is absurd. There are a few good moments in the book (as when Schultz, "poping" in order to gain favor with a rival Italian mob, "nearly jump[s] out of his skin" when the don, his sponsor, lays a hand on his shoulder during the baptism) and even a few good lines, perhaps the best of them failing to Billy himself as he muses on the grandeur of the hit man: "You are the raised fist in his darkness, you will fell him from his ignorance, it will cost him his life to know what you know." In general, however, Doctorow would have been wiser to have abided by an ancient piece of wisdom: If you don't have it, don't flaunt it.