Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95

Review by Steve Merrill

June 25, 1999
Web posted at: 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT)

(CNN) -- In this age of Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer, tales of personal agony, infidelity and violence carry a certain cachet. Call it dysfunctional chic, a modern tolerance -- even enjoyment -- of the dark possibilities of relationships. British author Deborah Levy's fifth novel, "Billy and Girl," manages to tap into this still-emerging cultural fascination with dramas that push the envelope of social etiquette and redefine what is acceptable in human interaction. Carefully avoiding the exploitative or trivializing nature of current talk-show therapy, Levy introduces a cast of characters whose pasts are at once sordid and intriguing.

"Billy and Girl" depicts the lives of two orphaned teen-age siblings living on the razor's edge between sanity and insanity. Abandoned by their mother and haunted by unverifiable tales of their father's fantastic fireball suicide, the two live alone in London, subsisting on the meager set-asides of their unreliable grandfather.

Billy, 15, spends the day in a kind of torturous nostalgia, poring over the details of his mother's departure and the brutal beatings he endured at the hands of his father. His sister, Girl, whose generic name is a byproduct of maternal indifference, roams the aisles of the nearby FreezerWorld grocery store, searching for her lost mother among the world-weary housewives who shop there. On other occasions, she scrawls desperate pleas for help on city walls or undertakes "mom searches," highly ritualized events in which she knocks at strangers' doors and greets the matronly types who answer with a pathetic "Hello, Mom."

The ties that bind Billy and Girl together as family are tenuous remembrances of shared pain, and their moments of greatest closeness are predictably founded upon the mutual infliction of psychological damage. Emotional torture and sadism are principal themes of the novel: "You can excite pain by touching the parts that hurt. That is what we are going to do," Billy admits at the novel's outset. In such a story -- one so deeply seared with anguish and unpleasantness -- the author faces a formidable task: to present characters with unlikable traits in a truthful manner, and yet raise them in the eyes of the reader so that they are not easily dismissed or condescended to.

Levy handles the challenge skillfully, leavening the darkness with unexpected glimmers of humor and sudden flashes of human insight -- gifts to the reader who confronts the suffering at the heart of the novel. This fortunate effect spins out of a critical authorial decision: to let the characters speak for themselves, without undue editing or interpretation. Short, jarring sentences are successfully employed to portray the protagonists' alienation and anger: Billy and Girl speak in unbroken monologues, voicing their opinions, obsessions and dreams in a snarling cadence. Two streetwise youths emerge in the process -- by turns rancorous, funny, bitter and shockingly truthful. The banality of British suburban life, the corruption and allure of fame, the hypocrisy of a culture fed on wealth and yet morally bankrupt all come under the scathing verbal assault of these societal throwaways.

For Levy it is a delicate balancing act, a craftsmanlike ebb and flow of comic and tragic elements, and of positive and negative images of Billy and Girl. In truth, the novel sometimes tips toward the self-consciously inflammatory, losing its way in an attempt to ratchet up the atmosphere of abuse and violence. But this is a minor complaint, not a fatal flaw.

That Levy is able, ultimately, to move the reader from simple to increasingly complex responses to her characters is a mark of subtle narrative achievement. As readers, we are initially shocked by the bluntly self-destructive tendencies of the siblings, but we are led to understand and then finally sympathize with them. We are able even to laugh, to see humor emerge like salvation into the bleakness of the protagonists' lives. It is a powerful vision, and undoubtedly constitutes an enjoyable and edifying literary journey deserving of a wide readership.

Steve Merrill is a former high school English teacher turned freelance writer and Web designer for CNN.