A review by salemdoorstop
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

4.0

About halfway through it struck me; this book is a car wreck, and the reader is a pedestrian watching the bodies being pulled out. The characters are all fairly hideous, but since human nature has us rooting for a happy ending we’re looking for them to evolve, or be victimized for their awfulness, or one and then another. But it just shuffled on, more and more embarrassing, awful, avoidable situations and you blush and squirm thinking, fuck, billy, why? The icing on the cake for me is that Waterhouse is one of those rare authors that puts together sentences that make you feel things so viscerally that you think you can see the story.