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Title: Boring Billy
Review: Like others, I read this novel because of the National Book Award accolades. McDermott's novel is entertaining and at times insightful, but it is rarely profound. I found myself skipping pages of text because I was not engaged in the plot or the characters' lives, and in the end, the story seemed to me like one-dimensional musings of life and life's unfulfilled dreams. "Charming Billy" is like a mediocre "Big Chill," and one wonders how it merited the National Book Award for fiction. While McDermott's writing is polished and mature, she fails to transcend the reminiscences of her characters to afford the reader perceptive or discerning truths about life. In the end, the novel failed to involve me and was quickly forgetten. It was, in a word, charming.
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