Billy’s Reviews

To describe his perennial theme, Lowry once borrowed the words of the critic Edmund Wilson: “the forces in man which cause him to be terrified of himself.” You see exactly what he means in this coruscating novel, which traces the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, once the British consul in a [...]

Affable Jack Gladney is professor of Hitler studies at a small midwestern college whose life is upended when a deadly chemical spill near his home creates what the authorities delicately term an Airborne Toxic Event. Gladney succumbs to anger and paranoia, and his wife, Babette, starts taking an experimental drug designed to do away with [...]

This may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless, globalized, intermarried, post-colonial age, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a [...]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308804/ref=nosim/calputerbusin-20In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Bronte’s novel we learn little about Bertha other than that she’s a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom [...]

When Kesey decided to take on the hypocrisy, cruelty and enforced conformity of modern life, he dug into his own experiences as a test subject in a mental hospital. In Cuckoo’s Nest the irrepressible inmate Randle McMurphy does battle with the icy, power-mad Nurse Ratched to liberate, or at least breathe a little life into, [...]

Watchmen is a graphic novel—a book-length comic book with ambitions above its station—starring a ragbag of bizarre, damaged, retired superheroes: the paunchy, melancholic Nite Owl; the raving doomsayer Rorschach; the blue, glowing, near-omnipotent, no-longer-human Doctor Manhattan. Though their heyday is past, these former crime-fighters are drawn back into action by the murder of a former [...]

When a tweedy, Catholic, pipe-smoking Oxford professor named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down to write a novel, who could have anticipated that his volcanic imagination would give rise to an entire continent, populated by elves, dwarves, orcs, wizards and ambulatory trees? Tolkien drew on his deep knowledge of ancient languages and mythology, and his [...]

Time magazine has called this one of the 100 best Novels of all time. Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first [...]