Al Capone Does My Shirts

These first three chapters provide essential background information about the novel’s characters and its setting.

The setting—the island which houses a famous prison—sets up one of the novel’s salient themes, the idea of being trapped against one’s will in an inescapable situation. The most obvious examples of this are the Alcatraz prisoners themselves, who are literally confined to their cells. Before showing us any of them in person, the novel introduces the concept of the prison’s morgue—the only way for inmates to leave Alcatraz is by dying. More figuratively, Moose begins the novel feeling trapped. Physically, his parents have made the decision to move to “Alcatraz (AKA: Devil’s Island),” a terrifying and unfriendly place full of “the worst of the worst” (3). Emotionally, Moose is locked into a complicated family situation, having to protect and care for his sister while managing his feelings of love for, embarrassment of, and pride in her. Finally, Natalie too continues the theme of imprisonment as we learn about the way her parents understand her intellectual disability: Cam describes her as sometimes been trapped in another world that she can’t leave.

Our protagonist, Moose, begins the novel as self-deprecating and full of self-pity. He has only just gotten over feeling like he was physically weak and unimposing, and now worries that he has an overdeveloped sense of duty: “I don’t like getting in trouble. I was born responsible. It’s a curse” (16). At the same time, the move to Alcatraz has made him isolated and lonely for Santa Monica and his best friend there. This intense self-focus is psychologically incisive given Moose’s age, and it explains why despite his ostensible desire to help and watch out for his sister, Moose is so uncomfortable and inept in that role. He is unable to coherently explain Natalie’s deficits to Theresa—his inelegant idea is to call Natalie a permanent 10-year-old, as opposed to his father’s much kinder and empathetic description of Natalie as a person who sometimes caught in a world inside her head. Moose also doesn’t know how to defend Natalie to insulting people like Piper without making Natalie perform in a demeaning fashion—because he fears Natalie’s outbursts, Moose hasn’t gotten to know her and thus can’t offer anything positive about Natalie besides her arithmetic talents.

Through the characters of Theresa and Piper, the novel suggests the corrosive effects of being on Alcatraz. Piper is already a rude tyrant in the making who wields her father’s power to compel those around her to submit. And even Theresa, who seems like she could be a good ally, has begun to dehumanize the prisoners, seeing them as objects for trading cards or morgue curiosities rather than people. This willingness to throw away a whole category of humans will connect to the novel’s exploration of how intellectually disabled people were treated during the early part of the 20th century.