Three Delays
Book | Charlie Smith
Love is a drug in this romantic picaresque.
Open Three Delays and you'll enter a world of madness. The book—a drug-soaked universe inhabited by incorrigible former child preacher Billy Brent—is narrated in the language of a man both crazy in love and crazy from drugs. Billy's trippy obsession with the fierce Alice Stephens carries him around the world, in and out of jail, and through the climaxes and nadirs of romance. Like any addiction story, theirs is a tale propelled by the imminent threat of self-destruction, as Billy and Alice make up and break up repeatedly for years at a time. Smith spanks the sentiment out of their attachment with sentences that billow with terrifying violence and hunger. Yet even as the couple speeds toward high-stakes danger, the novel is driven more by Smith's inventive warping of language than his plot devices. Smith never quite establishes what draws Alice to the frequently frustrating and idiotic Billy, yet at its heart this is exactly the novel's point: love is as irresistible as it is mysterious, stupid, and menacing.
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