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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Impressive debut - well done!, June 25, 2005
BELLY by Lisa Selin Davis
June 25, 2005
Amazon rating 5/5
BELLY by Lisa Selin Davis is the story of a modern "Archie Bunker", a mordantly funny story of a father in search of his old life, refusing to let go what no longer exists. BELLY is also a very impressive debut effort, wonderfully crafted and filled with such dark humor that I laughed halfway through the book.
Belly refuses to let go of the past, always moping about the daughter that died too young, while his remaining daughters continue to disappoint him. He has just gotten out of prison for his illegal gambling operation, and while there are no signs of it, he thinks his "friends" are just around the corner, ready to welcome him back with open arms.
His post-prison world is filled with things he cannot accept or comprehend. No longer are the republicans in office, but now the democrats are in power. His days of bragging about his friends in high places are no longer, and now he drinks alone. His bar is now a bistro, to his dismay, and his lesbian daughter now has a "friend" that is living in his house.
The epitome of dysfunctional families, the O'Leary's are a modern day Archie Bunker family, who has seen better days. Those who enjoy reading dark humor will find themselves chuckling over the bigotry that just seeps out of Belly, although in his heart, he is the one doing the right thing, and he tries desperately to bring back the family that he had always thought would be there for him.
I'm highly recommending BELLY for the way Lisa Selin Davis painted this truly sad piece of a human being that makes up the person that is Belly O'Leary. A man that is living in the past, one will feel pity for him, and at times will shake their heads, but there may be hope for him. A well-done character portrait of a person who cannot see anything past himself, BELLY is the type of book that will remain in the reader's memory for a long time. Highly recommended.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Belly Goes Deep, October 2, 2005
Lisa Davis's book takes a gamble on one man, Belly O'Leary, a 59-year-old bar-owner returning to his daughters after being released from prison. He's a drunk; he's mean; he's got nothing going for him, and yet with every page turned I wanted more of him. No one likes Belly, his daughters struggle not to hate him, but he's more real, more a man than half the men in everyday life who lack either the passion to follow their raw desires or the conscience to know when it led them astray - as in Belly's case, again and again. What he comes out of the can wanting, other than a lump sum of dirty money owed to him, is all the tenderness and love deprived of him as a child. The poignancy and ease of Davis's writing is mesmerizing as she creates the world of a broken-up lower class family in Saratoga Springs, New York during an August heat wave. Her words coddle you as she tells a heartbreaking story.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a remarkable, astute debut novel..., June 23, 2005
Reviewed by Leigh Newman for Small Spiral Notebook
Imagine a father who returns home after four years in prison for gambling, only to drink himself into a stupor on a hourly basis, break the heart of a lonely waitress, and sponge off his grown-up children. In your average first novel, that father's story would be told from the perspective of his children who, let's just say, half-love, half-hate, hate-fear the guy, but come to some kind of tidy understanding with him. In Lisa Selin Davis's first novel, expect nothing of the kind. In fact, prepare yourself for a complicated, ambiguous portrait of a man, told by that man, with such a depth of understanding that it approaches an almost Jamesian knack for psychology.
With every line, Davis is Belly-a middle age ex-con who just never figured out how to do the right thing in life. Belly covers for his Mafia bosses, only to find that they have no intention of rewarding him for his silence. Belly cheats on his wife with an opportunistic fortune-hunter who steals his money, and, even after the fact, longs for her to return. Belly fights in bars, hates gay people, and realizes "his oldest grandson was exactly the kind of boy he'd pick on back in junior high."
Of course, it is remarkable that petite, educated, bohemian, thirty-something Davis can assume the life of character so different from her. But essentially, all this proves is that Davis has the imagination and talent to write beyond the expected confines of the memoir-novel. What's more impressive is what she does with this character. Belly isn't a good guy. Further, he's bad guy. When his waitress girlfriend, Maybelline, tries to snuggle with him after making love, all he thinks is "What is the bare minimum I have to do to get this girl again?" Later in the book he realizes that Maybelline is "the kind of girl he took to family events, to places where he could show her off but might not have to talk to her. A filler...a way to get other women to pay attention to him.'
Davis doesn't soften Belly by making him a bumbling failure, either. She lets him live and think and be hard, which in the hands of a lesser artist, might alienate a reader over time. In this case, though, Belly becomes human via his grief-his buried grief that surfaces here and there, sometimes over his own behavior, sometimes over the death of his young daughter. It's this sense of sadness and honesty, combined with Belly's almost-delusional dreams of reinvention that bind us to him. In a larger sense, we end up hoping and feeling for the fictional life of someone who, in real life, we might detest.
Therein lies the conflict-and the larger, subtextual questions of the book. How can we understand our enemies? How can we love them, and hate them-and love them? Through this moral maze, Davis also manages to frame larger social issues. Belly returns to the city of Saratoga, a town which, when he left was a smalltime racing bust town. Now it's both a land of $5 Euro-coffees and a land of cut-price American chain stores-the quintessential national paradox that bewilders even those of us in real life, who have watched this same sychoprenic change in the landscape unfold over the years.
Belly, not surprisingly, is confused and enraged. And with him, the reader begins to long for the days of dive bars and 80's coke parties, back when downtown "main street" was depressed and dumpy, but the functioning, authentic heart of a town. This is an interesting point at which to arrive. Many of us might despair over the strip-mall landscape of the suburbs. But then again, who would exchange that for a seedy recessionville? A former student of urban planning, Davis places these larger social issues of economics and class into the novel with a light, subtle touch-a quality which characterizes her linework as well.
Stylistically, this novel is simply and straightforwardly written-few metaphors, a terse, contemporary diction, the voice of a white, small-town American male. Yet there is a grace to it, evident in such building phrases as, "Everything that happened happened long ago, twenty pounds ago, two girlfriends ago, a hundred thousand gray hairs ago." At times, this phrases are extended and expanded into an almost incantatory paragraphs, such as when Belly sleeps with the waitress Maybelline, thinking that "Of he closed his eyes, if he kept his eyes closed, yes, it wasn't Maybelline, it was Loretta. It was Lorettta, it was the first time, it was War Bar in its heyday, there was music, there was the music of murmuring and bass beat and that reassuring scent of stale beer."
Other times, Davis uses even more subtle techniques, inserting unexpected verbs into a sentence. For example, Belly "rescues" two remaining beers "strangled" in plastic. Later, after stealing a fifty dollar bill from his daughter, he lets it "brew" in his wallet. The technique not only works to create a fresh way to describe the ordinary, it also taps into the larger themes of the book-Belly's alcoholism and numbness.
Towards the end of the book, Davis describes a girl's Walkman music as "it bled out the tiny headphones." Music bleeding out headphones just feels real here-the authentic word for overheard, headphone music. And here, too, Davis is playing with language, using the verb "bled" to indicate the violence to come in the scene, during which Belly assaults and considers raping a young girl who is wearing his dead daughter's sweater. This is sophisticated language work that in the hands of less controlled writer, could turn into a bunch of cheap, obvious puns. Here, the layered meanings deepen the text.
Ultimately, Belly is a novel of redemption. But like so many other aspects of the book, this redemption is ambiguous. Yes, Belly agrees to fill out an application at Wal-Mart, which might be considered comic, except that his decision appears to signal his willingness to provide for his family and re-enter society, to somehow atone for his actions. Then again, his decision might just be another late-night grope at improvement that he'll never follow through on. Regardless, Belly's decision does say something about 21st -century America, that the big redemption in a person's life is a Wal-Mart application. And that's not comic. That's dark and bitter, sad and scary-and true.
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