Billy Bathgate

Doctorow narrates the whole novel in the voice of Billy Bathgate looking back from adulthood, a Bronx kid whose recruitment into Dutch Schultz's crew begins with literally juggling in the street, a skill the gang reads correctly as the sign of someone with unusual control and nerve. Billy's real education isn't in violence itself but in the numbers underneath it, the bookkeeping, the odds, the precise accounting Schultz's whole operation depends on, and Doctorow makes Billy's gift for mathematics the connective tissue between the small-time street hustler he starts as and the man capable, later, of decoding a dying gangster's delirious final ravings into a literal fortune.

Billy witnesses Bo Weinberg, a lieutenant who has fallen out of favor, bound and dropped alive into the East River wearing concrete overshoes, an initiation into violence Doctorow stages with total procedural calm, the crew discussing logistics the way they'd discuss any other job. Billy's fascination with Drew Preston, Schultz's cultured mistress who is slumming with the gang out of some restless appetite of her own, gives the novel its other axis, a boy testing how far up in the world his new proximity to power can actually take him, against a woman who was born into that world and finds gangsters more honest than the society she left.

Schultz's federal tax evasion trial, moved to sympathetic upstate Onondaga County on a change of venue, becomes an exercise in stagecraft as elaborate as any heist: the gang buys goodwill by having Schultz attend church, donate to charity, and charm the local jury pool in the weeks before the verdict. Doctorow treats the acquittal that follows as the novel's darkest joke, the law outmaneuvered not by force but by the same theatrical instincts Billy has been apprenticing in all along, a lesson in performance the boy absorbs as thoroughly as he absorbs the bookkeeping.