"Billy and Girl" by Deborah Levy

As promised in the post featuring Deborah Levy’s introduction to Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde, below you’ll find the first two chapters of Levy’s Billy and Girl. Dalkey Archive Press’s edition—which came out in 1999—was only the second novel of hers to appear in America. Beautiful Mutants had come out from Viking in 1999, but Swallowing Geographies and The Unloved were, at the time, only published by Jonathan Cape in the UK.

This seems unreal now given her prominence in the literary world, but, as was frequently the case, Dalkey was a bit ahead of the curve, with the books through which I think most readers discovered Levy—Swimming Home, Hot Milk, The Cost of Living, and The Man Who Saw Everything—coming out between 2011–19. (This is in no way to denigrate her other books, that came either before or after, but these four titles were ones that random readers and booksellers recommended to me, a very spotty form of research, but I don’t know that I’m totally wrong.) And, as mentioned earlier, we did follow up on Billy and Girl with Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places, which is quite interesting and fit in nicely with some of the other English-language female writers Dalkey published around that time: Diane Williams, Susan Daitch, Christine Schutt, Elaine Kraf, Brigid Brophy, Gail Scott, etc.

Billy and Girl is a brilliant example of the sort of “dark humor” typical of a Dalkey Archive book. That term gets thrown around a lot, to the point that it’s pretty meaningless—especially in jacket copy for a Big Five title—but was a hallmark of the sort of books John O’Brien liked, and of the many attributes that define a “Dalkey book.”

The jacket copy for Billy and Girl hints at the sort of bleak humor you’ll find behind the cover, which, in the excerpt below, is probably best represented by Girl’s “why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. (Which blows away my favorite version: “Why did the chicken cross the road? . . . Because FUCK YOU.”)

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

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