Billy and Girl

by Deborah Levy

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

Genres: Fiction, Novels, British Literature, South Africa, 20th Century, Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 1996

About the author

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh God, God, God this is good. Soooo goood. This is silk in prose form. A thorough back rub followed by a two-week cruise on the Med with Sophie Dahl in prose form. This is motherlickin’ awesome.

Billy & Girl is a novel about a brother and sisters. That plural wasn’t an accident. Girl is the protagonist, a whip-smart but damaged teenager who set fire to her father for beating up her brother, Billy. The novel follows their attempts to reinstate their lost parents following this inflammatory snub. Girl appears to suffer from a bipolar personality disorder, her ‘retarded’ self working in FreezerWorld as the dowdy Louise.

What makes this novel so good is how Levy pulls us into an implausible and demented world of two broken and fucked up children, lost in the shrub of a parentless wild, and makes us laugh and vomit and weep and stare gawp-eyed at the page in horror. Her style is more addictive than a chocolate-covered brownie fudge cake. At the centre of this chocolate-covered brownie fudge cake is hair and spiders and worms. Truly amazing.

As the story progresses, Louise materialises into a separate character, an actual distinct entity, and the novel opens up a box of hairy metaphysical goblins to gnaw your brain. The whole book burns with the most energetic and hair-tugging prose you’re likely to read about two teenage rapscallions living in their own psychopathic dream-delusion.

Read this or I will hunt you down and kill you.

[Mariel · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know that tv cliche of a bunch of really little kids getting asked what they wanna be when they grow up? And every kid answers something flashy like "Movie star!" and "Cowboy!" because it was the first flashy thing that came into their head? And then the story moves on as if there are no other thoughts in the heads of those children?
Billy and Girl is like that. I waited for the posturing to mean something other than off the top of their heads tv baby reflected sheen in their eyes... I waited to feel as in love with the characters as the author clearly was. I couldn't feel that. It felt like reading a magazine or watching a tv ad.
Girl has vague notions of romance. She has even vaguer notions about her daddy. I'm not sure where the Freezer World stuff comes in (I'm guessing it is a UK equivalent of Wal-Mart?), except some tossed in message! about unthinking latch key kids nursing on the teet of consumerism. I thought it was lazy. I wish that the multiple personalities had felt like, well, personalities rather than images to put on and play like a one-girl girl band line-up.
Billy was routinely and savagely beaten by their dad. Girl loved their daddy but mama made her do lots of chores and forgot her name (hence "Girl"). Billy loves the mom but she couldn't have loved him much. She lets him get beaten, for one (so does Girl), and then both parents ditch 'em. Girl takes out everything on Billy and Billy lives in fantasy land. To be happy the other one would probably have to suck it. A long series of vague fantasies like a two year old wants to eat candy all day long...

I don't want beep statistics. I didn't want the bravado! I wanted to feel like I wasn't hanging out with name dropping big talkers from my old high school, probably. These kids would be walk-on roles in a Law and Order spin-off show and felt like walk-ons. They just walked in and out, repeatedly. I didn't know anyone then. Maybe that's how it usually is... but why the hell am I reading this book for, then? The world just isn't made up of "we were abused so our every fart is special" (for all that happened to each other, they might as well have been on the tv in the room for all they took notice of reality.)

Billy's pizzas sounded absolutely disgusting. One time my ex ate this anchovi pizza, and just the smell made me feel sicker than I ever had in my life. I can't think about it without feeling sick. Nothing is more disgusting to me. Billy dumps the entire ocean on his pizzas. I want to throw up.

Next time a book description names "She's on a quest for the perfect cocktail" as a plot point, I'm not gonna read it. Just not gonna do it. If "My baklava angel" passes for fantastical endearments, I guess...

What did I need to write a review for? I should just say it's a series of fantasies that want to say we-hurt-the-ones-we-love without making anything near to a case for that. I don't believe you hurt the ones you love. I think you hurt people you can get away with hurting. The rest don't stick around.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some fantastic prose here, and some powerful exploration/exhumation/extrapolation of psychic pain. At times, unfortunately, I felt the characters fell into simple cypher territory, or became just mouths to speak some short, gnomic, sentences. Nevertheless, there are some breathtaking set-pieces, and I did enjoy the feeling of not quite having a grip on the "reality" of the text.

Definitely a talent, though my wife (who has read all of her books) tells me some of her later work is better. We shall see…

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having now read most of the Levy canon, this falls somewhere in the middle range - not quite as good as her masterpieces, 'Hot Milk' and 'The Unloved', but a bit more accessible and better developed than 'Swallowing Geography' or 'Ophelia and the Great Idea'. It actually most reminded me of the early work of another of my fave Brit authors, Philip Ridley, and had the author not been on the cover, I'd have suspected it was his.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathy Acker + Angela Carter = Billy and Girl.
A reductionist equation, but it gives you an idea of the effect of this bonkers brilliant novel. Levy walks a tightrope between absurdist comedy and searing trauma, balancing this teetering tone with panache. The front cover suggests this is a post-apocalyptic story, but it's set in our contemporary world where the landscape has been transfigured by the characters' desperate fantasies and riotous language. It's a stone-cold classic of teenage confusion.

[cass krug · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a straaaaange little book. the voice felt different for levy, lots of quirky choices with the tone she was using, which makes sense as the book follows two strange kids on their search to find their mother who has disappeared. there are supermarkets, robberies, kidnappings, and a lot of musings about pain and memory. billy and girl are telling themselves stories in order to cope with the reality of what happened to their family, projecting onto other people and trying to doctor them into who billy and girl are not as a means of survival. the themes of family felt reminiscent of august blue and brought to mind some of levy’s writing about her sense of home. where august blue felt too sparse too me, this almost verged on too colorful and abrasive. i went back and forth between having fun reading it and feeling put off-balance by it.

in the grand scheme of levy’s fiction, i found this not quite as mind-blowingly weird as the man who saw everything, but far more successful in its mysteriousness than august blue.

“Pain is as mysterious as love. A world of feeling and silence. Mood changes and sobbing. Both enter the body, love and pain often the same thing. Both cause profound change and even death. Biographies, symptoms, histories.“

[Rand]

Roughly seven years ago I snagged a galley of this from the discards pile outside the library of the local community college. Apparently there was once a feminist-leaning group at the college who did zines and classes on theory and stuff and this was part of their library collection.

I have gotten better books for free.

Read this one if you appreciate zaniness for the sake of zaniness. There were a few good lines (and Billy's narration of his conception-to-birth sequence was cool) but the characters were super annoying, which, for a "character-driven" novel spells trouble.

Part of the trouble with this book is how dated it feels now. Maybe if I had watched more TV in the nineties I would care more about this but I dunno.

[Nathanimal · Rating 3 out of 5]

If like me you enjoy being bounced around on the biceps of brawny sentences that throw lots of slangy declarative punches and fragmentary jabs, and hardly ever duck behind a namby-pamby qualifying clause, then you will probably enjoy this book where voice is king. But beware, this king is a dictator to whom all characters must bow by sounding exactly the same and not wanting much that is (to this reader, anyway) deeply felt or believable except to have that king's royal tongue in their mouths.

[Moore Flannery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t really know what happened here. This book is like when you are really tired and you get on a bus or a train whose route you know so well that you don’t listen to the incomprehensible driver announcements. Then suddenly you realise it’s dark outside and you are pulling away from a stop that is not ON your route and you don’t know where or when the next stop is - and your phone is flat and you have £2.75 in your pocket.

I’m doing 3 stars for the prose, the paragraphs the observation, the dream like quality edged alongside something knife sharp and slightly pressing on the flesh. I feel like Deborah Levy could sing me to sleep, I like her writing so much. However I don’t know if the events of this book are supposed to be ‘real’, whether Louise is two people or one, or whether Dad is alive or dead. I genuinely don’t know what happened.

[em · Rating 4 out of 5]

how very odd

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

review coming..
umm, I didn't engage much with the characters, I didn't feel the plot stood up, I didn't really feel any 'traction'. So why four stars? Because I liked some of the writing and the satire was brilliant. three and a half stars really, but rounded up because it's Christmas (nearly).

thought a bit more about this: the tale of kids trying to find parents (Girl knocks on random doors to see if their mother lives within) is blunt and a bit obvious; the 'Freezer-World' consumer satire is funny, and sometimes biting; the characters were knock-about laugh-a-lot ones, so when something serious like kidnap happens I didn't really feel the pain. That's even though Billy is writing a book about pain (he wants to be a doctor when he grows up). Readable, but a bit broad and flat for me.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for dalkey goodreads group. due dec 1st 2013
a bit flat on plot but makes up for it in neighborhood-dystopia. reminds me a bit of being 13 and totally drunk and high for like a week, and everything seems both perfect and surreal, and why can;t it be easier to have booze and drugs all all the time when you don;t have a job, money, car, or hell even hair?! but then too the grocery store scenes in this novel remind me of my local shop, which is both kinda fun and scary as shit. i love deborah levy for reminding me of 'good ol' days' and how to enjoy shopping.

i was wishing they would burn her dad up some more though.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange and dreamy book about two siblings - Billy and Girl who have been abandoned by their mother and are in search of her. For long periods of time reading this I didn’t really like it, but there were some very charming sequences. I think it’s an interesting portrait of family and the stories we create for ourselves in order to move forward. I love mischievous children in books so I did like that about it. I didn’t like the jumpy quality to the book, fragmented in a not particularly fun way. Felt very mixed throughout but I’m glad I finished it.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

freakishly good. loopy weird soaring woooo. at the beginning it made me feel a bit sick like a jacqueline wilson book, but actually it’s not like that at all. all the weird smart wry literary girls wish they wereeeeee

[Michela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m all for surreal, experimental books buuuuut if the topic is family bonds, I’ll still find it cheesy 😅

[Ennio Leseratte · Rating 4 out of 5]

das isch sehr toll gsi. s endi maybe bitz franslig. und würds gern rereaden, uf englisch. de schribstil het mi inspiriert und ha d characters gern becho. Was weird and heavy at times ❤️‍🩹
4.5!

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witch baby meets Sarah kane

[iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

really loved this but not so much the neatness of the ending.. but the construction of plot up till that was so good... and ofc the voice.... yummm

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was okay and had great potential, but somehow in the end, the author lost her book. A missing mother, an absent disfigured presumed dead father, two abandoned teens living alone on grandpa's gambling winnings, a stereotypical Indian store-owner's son, and a runaway girl with boring shoes - all the ingredients are there, but in the end, the soufflé flopped. Moments of intense intensity intensely rendered, but somehow the moments fizzled out, and at the end, the only thing missing was a rousing rendition of "99 bottles of beer on the wall".

[Oriana]

crazily enthusiastic review from MJ, wherein he says "As the story progresses, the novel opens up a box of hairy metaphysical goblins to gnaw your brain. The whole book burns with the most energetic and hair-tugging prose you’re likely to read about two teenage rapscallions living in their own psychopathic dream-delusion." Holyshityes.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a while, it was hard to tell where this was going; Levy's icy sharp language seemed all that kept me engaged. Then our unreliable narrators kept shooting themselves in the feet, the bad life choices just kept piling up, and we seemed headed for an ending in tears. But not quite. I think?

[Marie-Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Gritty, grotty story told in remarkably vivid prose. This takes a fair amount of time to get where it's going but the journey is breathless and mostly enjoyable.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have loved Levy’s other books, and I expected to love this. Maybe that was my error. I ended up feeling like I was wading through honey to finish this, so I gave up and DNF. I just couldn’t hack through any more.

The prose was evocative, but the sensation it was evoking in me was hopelessness and grime. I could feel myself living back in London, seeing those brightly lit shops in Brixton that always seem somehow greasy. Which is testament to the prose, the problem was I didn’t like it.

It is the kind of book that has several unreliable narrators and isn’t always grounded in reality. We get stories, half-truths, fantasies and philosophical ideas. Plot points are gradually revealed and we build a picture of what led these strange characters to be the people they are today. Generally I like this style, but there is an undercurrent of nastiness and depression that I just don’t feel like reading about right now. I found the hazy, scatterbrained thinking of the characters kept me at arms length. I also didn’t want to get to know them.

Maybe I’ll return to Billy and Girl, but for now, it’s no from me.

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Grief is like pain. Sometimes it’s hard to experience them apart. I still feel it along the pulses. You can excite pain by touching the parts that hurt. That is what we are going to do.” Billy & Girl is perhaps Levy’s most outlandish novel, though it is primarily concerned with themes of absent parents, self-sufficiency and sexual(-ish) awakening that occurs elsewhere. The jarring style of Levy’s prose and the way the narrative is fed out in cruelly frugal scraps — while returning to the consumerist-critical currents of her first novel Beautiful Mutants — pick up on questions of unlovability from its forebear, very specifically channelling these tensions and emotional fears into the perspectives of two young children, separated from both parents like citizens abandoned by their cruelly indifferent governments.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

It seems I’m torn with the style of Deborah Levy. I’m a big fan of two of her books, yet this and “Black Vodka” just weren’t for me. I found it hard to connect to the characters and I found it hard to know what was going on. Unfortunately “Billy and Girl” was not for me and I’m giving it a poor one star.

For more of what I thought,see my full review on my blog: https://whatrebeccasread.wordpress.co...

[Syd ⭐️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Deborah Levy fiction piece. I’ve hesitated because I adore her nonfiction and none of her fiction has called my name until this one. It follows two teenage siblings in their daily disfunction and search for their mother. This book is confusing and nonsensical. The prose is beautiful and reminds me of Levy’s nonfiction in the way it meanders. When you read Deborah Levy you’re simple riding the waves.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modern day take on a fairy tale. The prince and princess are a brother and sister abandoned by their parents when Billy was 10, under mysterious and disturbing circumstances. And their fairyland is a superstore called Freezerworld.
An uncomfortable but very cleverly written comment on modern day society and values.

[alexggrandma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alright. I mean.. AAAALRIIIIGHT: that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’ve collectively been talking about. It is just a joy to read a book dedicated beginning to end to such a radical style.

Awesome. Sometimes feels a little thin.. or contrived. But a good experience and im happy it exists

Will read more Deb Lev

[Jacquie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy and Girl rehearse their wild dreams for a better life, one with fame and riches and a constant supply of well made cocktails while all they want is their mum.
I thought it captured the bravado and pain of trauma brilliantly.

[isa · Rating 2 out of 5]

okay i fear i didnt really like this book. i wanted to and i can appreciate how weird and funky it is but it really didnt work for me. that being said, i am gonna try another deborah levy bc ive tried she's incredible.