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 reason— theoretically speaking—why Billy Bathgate, a wildly acclaimed novel by a man who has made a great deal of
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