My first time reading Doctorow and I'm a fan. Dutch Schulz, New York in the early 20th century, and great writing. What's not to like?

I just love this author. Really really great writing.

This was not my favorite Doctorow, though it contains some elements that make his works enjoyable: a vibrant description of an era of New York living, and fictional characters who bump shoulders with historical icons and footnotes alike.

Billy is a young boy from the Bronx who grabs the attention of an infamous gambling kingpin/bootlegger and joins his gang. Billy feels a surge of adult pride, but is soon witness to the intimate murder of another henchman by their boss. Perhaps a life of crime is more dangerous than bargained for, but now Billy is stuck. It becomes more precarious for him when he falls in love with the dead henchman and boss' shared mistress.

And here's where things start to unravel. What happens next reads something like the nostalgic fantasies of a creepy old man, made more icky when realizing this book finished second for both the Pulitzer and National Book Award in 1990 - a time presumably when books including icky old man fantasies regularly received such recognitions. As the only woman portrayed in the whole book, she is solely used as a sex object, appearing naked or in various states of undress more often than not - an alarming frequency for a book told from the perspective of a fifteen year old boy. The era and the life of organized crime from the perspective of a young boy are interesting; the sexual conquests of that young boy are not.

This book is Doctorow's masterpiece.

Good Lord, for the life of me I can't figure out why this book is so widely talked about (widely among Doctorow lovers, that is.) All of his books say "author of Billy Bathgate." Maybe its just me, but the story is not engaging me AT ALL. I thought it would at first, but I realized around page 130 that I just didn't care anymore. I'll probably pick it up again at some point, but not now.

A kind of child of [b:Augie March|11908|The Adventures of Augie March|Saul Bellow|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309282641s/11908.jpg|2453177] and Once Upon A Time In America. This image was in my head during much of the first half of the book.

Took quite a bit of time to get through but it was still a pretty good story

How does one concisely illustrate their thoughts on this story?

The Good: Doctorow is clearly a master wordsmith. When it is well suited to the purpose of a particular scene, his skill flows in a rising and falling motion. His characters were vivid and believable. And the scene setting/world building engaged all of the senses with a fastidious attention to detail which he delivers almost carelessly. Billy's introspection makes room for Doctorow's philosophies and the man is as much a philosopher poet as a dealer in fiction. Fiction is often described as a lie used as a vehicle to convey truth; that is what you will get in this tale.

The Bad: Billy continually works to reconcile his natural innocence with his ever-increasing reality of, at first moral ambiguity, and progressively a criminal bent. Therefore, his streams of consciousness make dramatic leaps from rich prose to absolute crass vocabulary in an instant. While I am not thick skinned, it was arresting more often than I would have liked. I do not impune the use of vulgarity and many of the characters are well suited to it. Yet, despite the illustration of Billy's development, I repeatedly struggled with the particular descriptions (and Billy's perceptions) of almost all things sexual.

Overall, it was a good read but not my favorite yarn. Doctorow's philosophies and vocabulary, however, were masterful.