Jun 20, 2016 09:17 AM
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Charming Billy is more sculpture than novel. The characters don't so much develop as exist like creatures suspended in amber, unyielding to the chaos of time, love, and grief. Unlike traditional stories chronicling how characters react of stimuli, studies in personal evolution this book illustrates the impossibility, for better or worse, of change.
The advancement of time only reinforces the essential substance of character and temperament. The novel opens with a debate at Billy's funeral service. Did Billy drink himself to death out of alcohol addiction, or did he mourn, for four decades the loss of his first love and eventually die or heartbreak the answer of course is more complicated. Billy was consumed by grief, not for the woman he lost but for the romance he was denied. His loyalty to an impossible ideal gave him a life of disappointment and a dispensation to drink. some portion was super.