Lennon, Brian. "Oot for England." Review of Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy. The Boston Book Review 6.5 (June 1999): 41.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

A stock trope in book criticism is to praise an author for finding her or his voice, for locating that second navel from which flow authenticity, originality, permanence. More than it needs anything else, literary realism needs the authority of a human speaker, whose version of events serves as a more or less convincing mirror of a reader's own ostensibly real world. Serious challenge to the ideologies of naturalism has of course been posed for more than a century, now, continuing to be ignored by aspirants whose literary- and aesthetic-historical curiosity is satisfied by the handful of contemporary novels they hope to emulate. This---and the defensive tendency to lump all such challenges under the scorned rubric "postmodernism"---can be frustrating to one's peers and competitors. In an essay from the early 1970s, the poet Robert Grenier worked himself into a performative episode of critical hysteria over the issue. "Why imitate 'speech'?" Grenier asked. "I HATE SPEECH." I always laugh out loud when I read this, because it is so intolerantly funny, and begs the question: [text missing]

Deborah Levy's Billy and Girl is a novel refreshingly unworried over its own authority. Its narrators are insouciant formations of language, rather than psychologized characters; they demonstrate how language forms, rather than being formed by, those who use it:

I am in the womb of my mother. I hear car alarms go off and sometimes I hear my father. He says, "Hello, babykins. This is your daddy speaking. We are looking forward to meeting you, over and out." I hear cats purring and Girl shouting, "You're late, brother. Come on out!" I don't want to be born. I'm never coming out. Dad tries again: "Hello, babykins, it's your daddy here. Time to face the world like a man---look forward to meeting you, son. Over and out."

"I," here, is Billy England, abused child, pain researcher, budding psychoanalyst and author of a treatise entitled Billy England's Book of Pain. "Girl" is his sister, no less miserable, who "wears her famous tears like jewels," walking through life thinking "her main thought: soon all the kids in England will be pushing up daisies." The siblings' father has committed suicide (or so it seems) by swallowing petrol and lighting a cigarette; following him, their mother has simply vanished. For a time, they are the wards of Grand-Dad, an elder relation whose unbearably corny jokes finally drove the youngsters to evict him from their house. Now, it would seem, they live on their own, subsisting on the cash Grand-Dad is permitted to send them by mail. On days off from her job at the consumer emporium FreezerWorld, Girl performs periodic "Mom checks," selecting a house in a picket-fence neighborhood, ringing the doorbell, and greeting the housewife who comes to the door:

"Who does your teeth, Mom?" Girl drops her menthol cigarette on the doorstep and stubs it out with the toe of her silver loafer. The woman just stares. She starts shaking her head, very slowly from side to side, her hand rummaging for something in her pocket. A piece of tissue stained with pink lipstick. She brings it to her lips as if to catch something in her mouth, something unpleasant she has chewed and wants to spit out.

"Billy is quite well but not all that well, thank you, and I am as you see me."

Naturally, It's never the real Mom; Girl escapes these confrontations in a taxi paid for by the browbeaten bourgeois, then returns to little Billy and to FreezerWorld. Until, that is, she and her brother decide to pull off a heist.

More (or less) than characters, "Billy" and "Girl" are tenacious bubbles of consciousness, boinging together like tethered balloons. There's something of the avant-pop in their mass-media newspeak, in the wearily ironized clichés and the insistent product placement of the unbearable flatness of being. And yet it is unbearable because it is suffered, rather than being blandly (or blindly) affirmed:

The only way Billy the beast is going to crawl out of his pain lair is for a snack. I, Billy, fifteen years old, prime cut of English beef, a sirloin amongst boys and boyz, no fat on this lean dude kitted out in his grotty underpants---waist twenty-six inches and that's only if I stick my stomach oot. Ooot for England.

Levy grants her underage caricatures a full spectrum of ethical sensation, and this may be where they most aggressively take their leave from the children of naturalism. Childhood innocence is, after all, a romantic function of post-scarcity civilization (and within it, Levy reminds us not a few times, class privilege), and we might well ask ourselves whether its guardianship also demands we relinquish the depersonalized and artificial discourse of mass media, as well, for the intimacies of organic literary "voice." A novel like Billy and Girl talks to this desire, without ridiculing it or denying its place in the paradox of literary culture.

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