National Review, May 5th, 1989
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 regul...
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