WHAT'S UR DOCTOROW?

Boohs I

A new novel— and its his best in years

STEPHEN SCHIFF

Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Roth, Vonnegut—the most famous contemporary American novelists are their own best characters. Read their books and you swallow them whole, the men themselves: Mailer in all his bullishness, Bellow in all his querulousness, Updike in all his needlepoint preciousness, and so on. We know these voices. Should they attend a party together, outsiders would have no trouble identifying the menagerie. Their brays and whinnies are familiar music.

But what does an E. L. Doctorow sound like? He certainly belongs at the same glittering soiree. His 1975 book, Ragtime, is among the most renowned and influential novels of the last twenty years; World's Fair won the 1985 American Book Award; The Book of Daniel (1971) is that rare political novel that can hold its own as a work of literature; and his brand-new book, Billy Bathgate, is the best thing he's written since: the story of a teenager who joins the Dutch Schultz gang and becomes the mobster's lapdog terrible. A masterly stylist of the Lush, Gorgeous Prose school (no Raymond Carver minimalism here, thank you), Doctorow is plainly one of the big boys: he's a peerless observer of detail and event, a crystaleyed imagist—a pro all the way.

And yet when Edgar Lawrence Doctorow enters the parlor, he doesn't lug some outsize literary persona along with him. The voice of his narratives, for all its rhetorical wind, is boyish and piping and a little bit wet, the slim voice of a child whose perceptions glisten all the more brightly for being untarnished by experience. The tone is detached, breathy; like the man himself, it shies from assertion and swagger. "I do like the selfless feeling of writing," he tells me in his slight Bronx accent. "You know those old games on the comic pages where you look for the hidden faces in the leaves— how many foxes can you find in this tree? That's what I do. In terms of my relationship with my narrators, I'm the fox in the tree. And you have to look very hard to find him."

The fox himself turns out to be agreeably professorial and rumpled, a cardigan-and-loafers type with a scruff of beard that's more salt than pepper and a manner so fubsy and distracted that one can easily picture him aputter in some dank basement lab, jostling test tubes instead of adverbs. We are sitting at a table in the office of his Random House editor, Jason Epstein, and on a nearby wall is a picture of him and Epstein together, kvelling photogenically over a giant hunter's decoy—a loon. The novelist feels comfy in these precincts. After a three-year stint as a reader for Columbia Pictures, Doctorow was himself a successful book editor, and at fifty-eight he still has an editor's selfeffacement—the air of the coach behind the athlete, the mind behind the Mind. He talks slowly, hoisting a quizzical eyebrow aloft, his forehead breaking around it in waves—it's the look of a man on whose face alarm has frozen forever. Perhaps that alarm blossomed during the sudden onset of fame that followed Ragtime's publication in 1975; in any case, Doctorow still seems engaged in some fierce inner battle, some war against his own vanity and renown. Catching himself in a moment of self-appreciation, he dispels his embarrassment with a chuffing little laugh—huh! huh! huh! huh!— that sounds like a ball bouncing down stairs.

"You gotta really stay honest in this business," he tells me. "Degas once said, 'Vanity is mediocrity.' And Degas didn't hang around with the Parisian art world; he just wanted to make his paintings. That is a saintly, magnificent vision of what we should be doing. Vanity is mediocrity—it's a tough one to follow." Yet somehow Doctorow has. One may not find the alluring stamp of Personality on his prose, but one also never sniffs the reek of ego, and that may be because Doctorow is the paradigm of the artist as conduit, as the channel through which some breath of creation whistles. The way he describes the writing process is curiously passive. He makes it sound like a meditation.

"You have to surrender to the act of writing," he says, "give up to it, and trust that if you have anything, It will discover it for you. Whatever is your ordinary self is just shucked, and then you're not only in the lines you're writing, you are the lines. You're going from those nouns to the verbs; they are the synapses of your brain and of yourself." As he talks, the process seems to be unfolding before your eyes; it's as though Doctorow had entered some balmy trance, his eyes beaming inward, locked on the very procedure he's describing. "You start writing about violence or love, you can feel it in your muscles. There are these small, ghostlike echoes or reactions, like little diluted versions of the real thing. If you're really using your mind, and all the little chemicals are bubbling around and rushing from one little nerve ending to another—huh! huh! huh! Well, it's very physically active." He pulls out of it for a moment, and his voice returns to its customary low burble. "So that is a kind of innocence," he says. "You don't have vanity when you're doing that."

But what sets the process in motion? Does Doctorow simply open up and let the swollen rivers tumble forth? Reading some of his soppier passages, you might think so; in Loon Lake (perhaps his worst novel) and even parts of Billy Bathgate, he frequently resorts to a gushy stream-of-consciousness style that cries out for heavy damming. Elsewhere, though, his books achieve a bracing momentum that has almost nothing to do with the plot. It's as if the reader were skimming along atop Doctorow's own keen discoveries, the author's vision opening up for us as it seems to be opening for him, with an almost psychotropic clarity. "You write to find out what it is you're writing," he says. "The reader is reading to find out, and that's how you have to write. Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." He arches an eyebrow, and his tone drops almost to a whisper. "You can't plan what to do. You're in the thing, and you say, 'Oh. So this is what I'm doing. This is what I must mean.' "

The novel takes off at a clip that nothing else in Doctorow's occasionally poky fiction prepares one for.

Which is exactly what happened as Doctorow was composing Billy Bathgate. Just as Ragtime was inspired by his august white house in New Rochelle, New York, just as World's Fair grew from the resonant memory of "a baby crawling over to the bureau in his parents' bedroom and seeing the little brass handle on it," so the image that stirred Billy Bathgate to life was "guys in tuxedos on a tugboat." That vision yielded the novel's voluptuously horrific first scene, in which the book's fifteen-yearold hero, Billy, finds himself on a New York tugboat, watching the oddly ceremonious fitting of one Bo Weinberg, a senior member of the Dutch Schultz gang, for that traditional accessory of the doomed, cement shoes. From there, the novel takes off at a clip that nothing else in Doctorow's occasionally poky fiction prepares one for. It's not just the story line that sustains one's excitement; it's the growing richness and strangeness of Billy's moral world. Billy Bathgate is a portrait of the banality of evil—I don't mean Dutch Schultz's (his iniquity is, in Doctorow's portrayal, directed and cunning and supemally energetic); the evil is young Billy's. And unlike other fictional variations on that theme, even superb ones (Louis Malle's great film Lacombe Lucien comes to mind), Billy Bathgate is also a feat of sympathetic imagination. Doctorow has entered Billy's mind completely—seldom has the tree more perfectly concealed the fox—and that mind turns out to be at once innocent and morally complex. It is a mind that can reel from Schultz's enormities and yet participate in them avidly—a mind that by the end of the book will encapsulate all the perversions of that peculiarly American energy that has dominated this century, all the ways in which ingenuity and enterprise mutate into the intricate corruptions of contemporary Wall Street and Hollywood and Washington.

But perhaps the book's most acute insight is this: that the key to our corruption lies in the kind of hero worship Americans are taught practically from the day they're bom. Billy Bathgate himself is a fervent (though not unquestioning) disciple; his entry into the Schultz gang resembles nothing so much as the initiation of a green apostle into some charismatic religious order. Even Dutch Schultz's ghastliest deeds are pored over for the lessons they may contain, and the crime boss's very explosiveness and whimsicality—his blithe willingness to commit monstrosities better men haven't the stomach for—come to seem the proof of his sacredness. Doctorow is exposing something big here: the propensity of intelligent men to venerate evil, to admire scoundrels for their lack of crippling compunction. Villains commit dreadful acts, but they're also decisive, infinitely capable—free.

Talk to Doctorow about the political and religious issues Billy Bathgate raises and you may be struck by the feeling that they've occurred to him only in retrospect. Discussing politics, he can sound dewily ingenuous ("He's naive left all the way," says a writer who knows him well); talking religion, he rails against the established orthodoxies with all the moist fervor of a newly disaffected sophomore. And when you trace the fantasy materials that recur throughout his fiction, they look almost touchingly boyish and antiquated: gangsters and cowpokes; broken-spirited poets; tough but frail-looking blondes whisked out of reach by sleekly dangerous hooligans. If Doctorow is indeed the artist as conduit, then what he's channeling is the great American dreamwork; his materials are the stuff of our legends—and our schlock. Yet at his best Doctorow is able to reimagine them from the ground up, and to reignite the moral and political issues buried in their ashes. Doctorow is like a medium for our dead fictions; as they flow through him, they come out alive and sizzling.

"It's a very highly alert state of reception you put yourself in," he says. "It comes of a certain self-training you do, and it requires great will, an enormous effort." Suddenly he stops and pulls himself closer to the table, and I can see that something in him has just clammed up. He's uncomfortable; that alarmed eyebrow is craning toward his scalp. Would he rather not discuss his methods at all? "Well, it's very mysterious, all this stuff, and I'm not sure I like to talk about it," he admits. "It's not that orderly. And it's full of torment and confusion and false starts."

And besides, isn't the part of the writer's mind that can analyze the process— isn't that also the very part that can unwittingly block the passageways, gum up the works, spook the muse? Doctorow can barely force himself to acknowledge it. "One's work habits are small arms against the daily invasion of chaos—which I think is the writer's mind." He stops again, but this time an energy seems to fill him. "The whole point of this thing is not to know too well what you're doing," he says. "Not to know too well. Actually, I used to know more about all this than I do now." He grins. "Now I just do it."