Charming Billy is most sculpture than novel. The characters don’t much develop as exist like creatures suspended I amber, unyielding to the chaos of time, love ad 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 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 ad eventually die or heartbreak the answer of course is more complicate. Billy was consumed by grief, not for the woman he lost but for the romance he was denied. His loyalty to an impossible ideal him a life of disappointment and a dispensation to drink
Fundamentally a message-less book for me, summed up by this sentence, "nothing they felt, at last, has had any effect"(page 245)
Finally I like very much this book