Belly: A Novel

By Lisa Selin Davis

Four years after serving time for his illegal gambling activities, Belly O'Leary finds his hometown and relationships with his daughters irrevocably changed and lapses back into dysfunctional behavior before struggling to come to terms with a tragic accident from years earlier.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316158801
• ISBN13: 9780316158800
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Belly, A Book For The Ages

This book is like finding some unpublished treasure by Richard Russo or Richard Price lurking on the "new fiction" table at your favorite bookstore. Indeed, Lisa Selin Davis, a name new to me, out-Russos Russo with her unsparing portrayal of an ex-con down on his luck and half-heartedly trying to make a new start in his old town, that has moved on during the four years he was in the pen for a gambling offense. Lisa Selin Davis does for charming Saratoga Springs what William Kennedy used to do for Albany, viz, turn back the sprightly facade to expose the horrifying underside--in this case, I'm tempted to call it the under "belly"--of a major New York State city. Saratoga Springs, with its race track and its vast pool of crooked pols and gang related graft, is meaty turf for Lisa Selin Davis, and she chooses to frame her story with a modern updating of the old legend of the "Judgment of Paris." If you remember, Paris was given the questionable honor of having to award the golden apple to one of three goddesses. In BELLY, our hero has to come back and remake acquaintance with his three daughters, different as day is from night as they are from one another. One is a frustrated artist and a "mouse," another a Lesbian and largely offstage, though her girlfriend is very visible; Belly refers to her as his "Basset Hound," and finally there is Nora, the mother of three sons she has named after different rock guitarists, Jimi, Stevie Ray, and King (after B.B, King). Yes, it's the kind of heavily ironic and trashy signature that you find only in novels, but it works well in this context because otherwise you might have a bit of trouble telling Belly's different women apart. Davis is great with creating male characters, but what keeps her ahead of the pack is her unusual interest in probing women and what makes them keep trying to love a man who has never done anything to them but put them down and treat them badly. It's like the Stockholm Syndrome, but in honor of Lisa Selin Davis' canny knack for characterization, I propose renaming it the "Belly Syndrome," for unlikeable Belly O'Leary might well be played by Jack Nicholson in the bittersweet film version of this novel, if one were made, and if Nicholson were on the market for an Oscar-worthy final role, a fitting sequel to "Five Easy Pieces" or "As Good as it Gets." Lisa Selin Davis also has a poet's gift for language, and sentence by sentence there is always something memorable in every line, whether it is an unexpected metaphor or a new way to describe the seamy side of Saratoga Springs. She is a writer to watch out for.

Belly Goes Deep

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.

Belly by Lisa Selin Davis

In the middle of reading Belly I had the uneasy thought that Lisa Selin Davis, a woman I have never met, had written the story of my father's life. Belly O'Leary, the main character, returns home to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Belly served four years in jail for taking bets in his bar, an ironic crime considering the proximity of the famous racetrack and the plethora of OTB outlets scattered throughout New York. You can place a bet, you just can't do it in a bar. Belly's reentry ordeal rivals anything NASA might offer a returning astronaut. Belly cannot and will not accept the diminished state of his life, his prospects, or his hometown. His daughter, Nora, his probation officer, grandkids, ex-wife, and mysterious mistress Loretta form an archipelago of failure, living reminders of Belly's shortcomings as a person, a father and husband. Through epic bouts of drinking Belly darkly pursues the ghost of his third daughter, long since dead. He is certain that Loretta will return to him, flush with their loot from the bookmaking, lifting him from the grasp of big box employment, the straight life, a nightmare of routine and regimen too harrowing to consider. The author lets Belly run, but always keeps the hook in his mouth, the hopes and schemes, and the rage that fuels him. "Are you through ruining my party yet?" his grandson asks after a disaster at a confirmation party. The boy asks the question that everyone wants the answer to, certainly Nora whose house becomes the eye of the storm once her father arrives. Though exiled to the attic Belly prefers passing out on the living room couch where family members discover him the morning after. Belly is as startled as they are by the dimensions of his predicament. Only Loretta, the woman of his dreams, can release him from delusions of restoration, that time has stood still pending his release from jail. Equipped with memories both vivid and highly suspect, Belly weaves a universe of possibilities. When reality intrudes, he is forced to acknowledge that the idealized past was not much better than the dismal present. Ms. Davis wraps things up with a metaphorical reference to a childhood trauma, one that is appropriate to the circumstance. Belly is a superb novel, one I highly recommend.

a remarkable, astute debut novel...

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