In Doctorow's hands, however, each description is unique, and carries with it a distinct thrill. All too easily it can slip into the clinical, the mechanical, until soon every scene sounds the same. As anyone who has ever tried knows, writing about sex and violence is difficult. Doctorow never has to tell us this he does it all with a slight shift of style.Īnother virtue of the book-something all good gangster novels should have-is vivid, gritty scenes of sex and violence.

At the end of a crucial chapter, Billy's sentence structure will become more complicated, his metaphors more sophisticated, but Doctorow's alters them so subtly, he keeps the language so completely in character, that we soon come to realize we are listening to a reflective, older Billy commenting on his childhood memories. Once Doctorow has successfully created this illusion, however, he manipulates the narrative voice-and our perceptions of it-in a remarkably ambitious way. He describes his streets and adventures in the way that an intelligent boy of his age would see them, and he soon convinces the reader both of the believability of his character and of his reliability as a narrator. Like his literary ancestor Huckleberry Finn, Billy speaks naturally, with colloquial snap and humor. This picaresque novel about Bronx-born “Billy Bathgate” Behan, a street urchin and errand-boy for the Dutch Schulz mob, memorably evokes the tough urban streets of the early '30's, but its principal achievement is the voice of the first person narrator, “Billy Bathgate” himself.

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