Cultural Map of New YorkIn Billy’s prianding, Bronx is not a place of wealth. pared with Manhattan, it is out-of-place, unprivileged and characterless:
All the time we hung around the warehouse on Park Avenue, and I don’t mean the Park Avenue of wealth and legend, but the Bronx’s Park Avenue, a weird characterless street of garages and one-story er yards and the oasional frame house covered in asphalt siding that was supposed to look like brick, a boulevard of uneven Belgian block with a wide trench dividing the uptown and downtown sides, at the bottom of which the trains of the New York Central tore past thirty feet below street level, hing racket we were so used to…. (22)
Since it is out-of-place, it bees the place where gangsters are brewed, and thus the kids in the neighborhood feel superior to kids in other neighborhoods, as Billy says: “It was a neighborhood thing; ” and “it was the culture of where you lived.” If the sidewalks of the Bronx neighborhood are filled with wandering children in the daytime, they are possessed, however, at night by adults, with “card gaoops and cigar smoke drifted through the summer night, and the women in their housedresses sat like girls with their knees pointing up froeps and couples strolled in and out of the streetlights, ” which makes Billy “very moved by the sullen idyll of all this impoverishment” (34).
Impoverished and out of place as it is, Bronx provides its inhabitants with a busy market full of life, which is in Bathgate Avenue. Billy’s footsteps take us to a vivid and lively picture of the local life:
I got off a stop early and walked a block west to Bathgate Avenue. This was the market street, everyone did their shopping here. I walked along on the crowded sidewalks between the pushcarts on the curb and the open stalls in the tenehe peting with the same oranges and apples and tangerines and peaches and plums for the sats a pound, ten cents a pound, a nickel each, three for a dime. They wrote their prices on paper bags which they hung like flags on wooden slats behind each crate of fruit or vegetables. But that wasn’t enough. They shouted out their prices. They called Missus, look, I got the best, feel this grapefruit, fresh Georgia peaches just in. They talked they cajoled and the women shopping talked back. I felt a little better now in all this innocent, urgent, only slightly larcenous life. (88)
In this picture of the Bathgate Avenue he products sold there, but also hear the voices, she “innocent larceny” of the life. It is perhaps just the word “larcenous” that provides the inspiration for Christopher anding that reading the novel is like “larceny, ” by which he means that readers replace the author, and in fact kill the author, in their reading process, and thus extends the trope of reading as larceny or murder (anding of the issue is that, it may be the vivid description that seems so like the real life of Bronx in the 1930s that may make the readers forget the author’s creation of the novel as fiction, and take it as a documentary, that makes the readers oblivious of the existence of the author’s imagination, and in this sense, replace the author. But the truth is, without the author’s own life experience of growing up in New York in the 1930s, the description of it impressive. So the point is not “the death ” of the author, but the “life” of hiween the lines.
In The Book of Daniel，it is the lively gives Daniel the sense of getting near his home when he and Susan escape froer and walk in their pilgrimage to their original home. And here，in Billy Bathgate，it is still the innocent but lively market life in Bathgate Avenue that makes Billy feel better on his way hohere is an intertextuality between the two. Though Billy may not like the Bronx neighborhood，Bathgate Avenue always appears as a “positive ” image in his mind，otherwise he would not have taken “Bathgate ” as his surname，or he would not introduce to Drew Preston his name as the name of “the street of plenty，the street of the fruits of the earth.” There is actually a certain kind of pride within Billy to be living near Bathgate Avenue，though he hiiously recognized this intimate emotion of him towards the street.
pared with the lively markets in Bathgate Avenue, Billy’s own aparto be shabby and undesirable. What Billy recounts a lot is the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children, the orphanage across the street of his apartment, which seems to take the place of his apartment and gives him a better sense of home. When he walks on his way hohe little orphans playing before the orphanage makes him peaceful, out of his familiarity with it. Much like what Lynch says, the fa gives the person who has lost his way a coes the terror of not finding his way (Lynch 1960:4). The image of orphanage is also important in other novels by Doctorow, for exahe Shelter, however, gives no sense of home to Daniel, and the orphanage in The Waterworks — the Home for Little Wanderers, bees the place where evil scientific experiments are carried out.
Billy’s perception of his neighborhood has gone through a treurns to it after experiencing the luxurious and adventurous life outside it. In his eyes: