Billy Bathgate is a young street urchin who attaches himself to Dutch Schultz and his mob & proceeds to narrate Dutch's decline and fall.

I didn't think this one was up to the standard that Doctorow has set in books like Ragtime (see Review) & Waterworks.  For one thing, mobsters have been done to death. But more significantly, fiction with the arc of tragedy requires a tragic figure--here, we never like Dutch enough to care that he gets his comeuppance.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (C) Orrin C. Judd

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