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Charming Billy
«Tout le monde l'aimait. Si vous l'aviez connu, vous aussi vous l'auriez aimé.»
Après l'enterrement de Billy Linch, ses amis et sa famille se réunissent dans un bar du Bronx pour évoquer les bons moments passés ensemble. Ils redécouvrent le plaisir de boire un verre alors que l'alcool était devenu un vrai problème dans la vie de Billy. Sa veuve, Maeve, est là. Elle a toujours veillé sur Billy et chacun admire son courage. Mais personne ne peut évoquer Billy sans penser à cette jeune jeune Irlandaise. Car un été, à Long Island, il y a si longtemps, il est tombé éperdument amoureux de la jeune Eva. Il voulait l'épouser, elle est retournée en Irlande. Malgré sa promesse, elle n'est jamais revenue. Dennis, le cousin de Billy, n'a pas osé avouer la vérité. Il a préféré lui dire qu'elle était morte d'une pneumonie.
Ce sera à la fille de Dennis de découvrir cette vérité et de révéler à chacun combien cet amour perdu les a tous liés au-delà de ce qu'is pouvaient même imaginer.
Après l'enterrement de Billy Linch, ses amis et sa famille se réunissent dans un bar du Bronx pour évoquer les bons moments passés ensemble. Ils redécouvrent le plaisir de boire un verre alors que l'alcool était devenu un vrai problème dans la vie de Billy. Sa veuve, Maeve, est là. Elle a toujours veillé sur Billy et chacun admire son courage. Mais personne ne peut évoquer Billy sans penser à cette jeune jeune Irlandaise. Car un été, à Long Island, il y a si longtemps, il est tombé éperdument amoureux de la jeune Eva. Il voulait l'épouser, elle est retournée en Irlande. Malgré sa promesse, elle n'est jamais revenue. Dennis, le cousin de Billy, n'a pas osé avouer la vérité. Il a préféré lui dire qu'elle était morte d'une pneumonie.
Ce sera à la fille de Dennis de découvrir cette vérité et de révéler à chacun combien cet amour perdu les a tous liés au-delà de ce qu'is pouvaient même imaginer.
294 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
About the author
Alice McDermott
21 books1,434 followersAlice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is Johns Hopkins University's Writer-in-Residence. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, Long Island, NY [1967], Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead NY [1971], the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975, and later received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
She has taught at the UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg and Hollins Colleges in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen.
The 1987 recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, and three-time Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nominee, lives outside Washington, with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
She has taught at the UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg and Hollins Colleges in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen.
The 1987 recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, and three-time Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nominee, lives outside Washington, with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,107 reviews
March 18, 2021
In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion...Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many millions with just one more.Charming Billy tells of a New York Mic who, as a young man, had a great passion for an Irish lass. She returned to the old country and he expected her to come back when he sent for her. But she up and married someone else. His cousin Dennis knew the truth and lied to Billy, telling him she had died. Later in life, Billy goes to Ireland, intending to visit her grave, and finds her alive and feeling guilty. Oops.
Alice McDermott - image from Johns Hopkins University
The story is structured around a wake held for Billy after he had basically drunk himself to death, made up of the recollections of the folks present, a bit of their individual stories. The narrator is the daughter of his cousin and best buddy Dennis. The book describes the culture of its New York Irish Catholic characters (my peeps) through their relationships with each other.
I was surprised that I felt mostly unmoved, but then, towards the end, when people realize the waste they have made of their lives, it struck a chord, or maybe was busy tuning up the entire bloody orchestra, and I was weepy as I turned the pages, pausing frequently with uncomfortable recognition. I found myself wishing or wondering about a choice made a lifetime ago and how things might have turned out had I decided otherwise. Of course, they might not have wound up any better. I'll just never know.
The book captures that ennui well, and I recognize it in myself, having grown up in the culture she describes. Hopefully it is a curable trait, although at my age, I seriously doubt any such cure, even if found, would apply. I also recognize the pain of having spent so much of one's life dedicated to something that turned out to have been different from what I had expected and hoped for.
The ability of Charming Billy to tug those heartstrings, to prompt one to step back and take a look at one's life, is one of the major strengths of the novel. That McDermott portrays with chilling accuracy and insight a living culture is another. There are reasons this book won the National Book Award.
Published - December 31, 1997
Review first Posted - March 10, 2017
PS - I read this book in 1999 and wrote most of this review then, but did not post it until March 2017, after a bit of editing.
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September 17, 2023
Una historia sencilla escrita con sencillez y trenzada con mentiras sencillas, esperanzas sencillas, deslealtades sencillas, sacrificios sencillos, amistades sencillas, amores sencillos de personas muy sencillas. Aunque detrás de tanta sencillez no es todo tan sencillo, a mí, este “Hombre con encanto”, me ha encantado sencillamente poco.
March 17, 2024
When Maeve spilled the steamed spinach, I was rooting for the dog. The story was so tedious and slow that it nearly drove me to drink. I finally gave up the ghost on page 205. DNF
September 20, 2007
I confess, I have OWNED this book for a couple of years. I started it twice, thinking an award-winning book should surely win me, but both times set it aside. But after reading McDermott's "After This" recently, I picked up "Charming Billy" again. I can only think that the books we respond to are inextricably related to whatever consciousness or thoughtfulness or even patience with life we are currently experiencing. This all to say that this time around, I loved this book. The writing is so beautifully crafted, each sentence interesting as it wends its way through, down, and across the pages. The story of a tightly-knit group of New York Irish Catholics mourning the loss of one of their own, you almost emerge from the fog of an hour's reading with a brogue on your lips (though the characters have long lost theirs).
June 30, 2007
Charming Billy is what happens when you stop in the library on a whim, before you have registered at Goodreads and before you have an idea of what you want to read, and you find the book with the pretty cover, in this case, the one with a shiny golden seal that says "National Book Award Winner." It is similar to the way in which I shop for wine. And certainly every bottle of wine has something to commend it--alcohol, at least. So, too, does this book have facets to commend it: clean writing, easy reading, interesting use of the narrator, poetry-like repetition of certain phrases and words throughout, alcohol. But truly, as a hard drinker from hard-drinking stock, I STILL did not find the characters to be resonant. Perhaps part of the problem lies in the fact that the dialogue was unbelievable. Here is a tiny sample from near the end of the book, which coincided with my realization that a large part of what was bugging me about the book was the unbelievability of the dialogue.
"She chose him, and as far as I can see he fit her to a T. Her old man all over again. Someone to maneuver, to shore up. An alcoholic with a shadow across his heart. An alcoholic because he had a shadow across his heart, the way I see it...I don't begrudge her her tears, of course, but I wonder, too. Would she have known what to do with a sober man, with the full force of the affection of a sober man who'd never loved another?"
Um, do you talk like that? I certainly do not. I wish that Ms. McDermott would trust her readers enough to understand her meaning from regular dialogue.
"She chose him, and as far as I can see he fit her to a T. Her old man all over again. Someone to maneuver, to shore up. An alcoholic with a shadow across his heart. An alcoholic because he had a shadow across his heart, the way I see it...I don't begrudge her her tears, of course, but I wonder, too. Would she have known what to do with a sober man, with the full force of the affection of a sober man who'd never loved another?"
Um, do you talk like that? I certainly do not. I wish that Ms. McDermott would trust her readers enough to understand her meaning from regular dialogue.
November 17, 2008
Charming Billy is more sculpture than novel. The characters don’t so much develop as exist like creatures suspended in amber, unyielding to the chaos of time, love, and grief. Unlike traditional stories chronicling how characters react to stimuli, studies in personal evolution, this book illustrates the impossibility, for better or worse, of change. The advancement of time only reinforces the essential substance of character and temperament.
The novel opens with a debate at Billy’s funeral service. Did Billy drink himself to death out of alcohol addiction, or did he mourn, for four decades, the loss of his first love and eventually die of heartbreak? The answer, of course, is more complicated. Billy was consumed by grief, not for the woman he lost but for the romance he was denied. His loyalty to an impossible ideal gave him a life of disappointment and a dispensation to drink.
The time line is complex, perhaps needlessly so, skipping back and forth over four generations. It traces the behavior and motivations of a wide cast of characters, each of whom is rendered with lapidary precision. The winding and rewinding narrative shows the circumstances that produce each character’s immutable temperament--the greedy grandmother’s childhood of deprivation, the cynical cousin’s adored but absent father--and follows those characters through marriage, family, and death. At its core, it is a book about the perils of sentimentality--yet every character is formed by an adolescent love or sorrow, and there is a kind of sentimentality in that.
The novel opens with a debate at Billy’s funeral service. Did Billy drink himself to death out of alcohol addiction, or did he mourn, for four decades, the loss of his first love and eventually die of heartbreak? The answer, of course, is more complicated. Billy was consumed by grief, not for the woman he lost but for the romance he was denied. His loyalty to an impossible ideal gave him a life of disappointment and a dispensation to drink.
The time line is complex, perhaps needlessly so, skipping back and forth over four generations. It traces the behavior and motivations of a wide cast of characters, each of whom is rendered with lapidary precision. The winding and rewinding narrative shows the circumstances that produce each character’s immutable temperament--the greedy grandmother’s childhood of deprivation, the cynical cousin’s adored but absent father--and follows those characters through marriage, family, and death. At its core, it is a book about the perils of sentimentality--yet every character is formed by an adolescent love or sorrow, and there is a kind of sentimentality in that.
October 15, 2017
This was a reread. Years ago I read this one when it was new. It didn't connect as Alice McDermott for some reason. After I read Someone and loved it so much, I should have recalled this much earlier novel of hers.
Honestly, this time around I really did laugh at a few points. Especially upon the noting that the Protestants must know Our Lord a lot better since they call him by His first name all the time. But I also remembered the ending about 1/2 way through, so that took some wind out of the sails for this read. Still VERY enjoyable and I do disagree that this is a dunning work or stereotype Irish alcoholic tale. I did not find it that at all. I found Billy to be Billy.
But I have to admit, in my head he was always Dennis Leary in his "Rescue Me" role. I wanted him to have a fireman's cap instead of the work clothing for the shoe store.
You either seem to love Alice McDermott or hate her and call her work "tedious". I love it. And give me some of her "tedious" every day of the week. Good intent folks as the people I have known in great majority.
Honestly, this time around I really did laugh at a few points. Especially upon the noting that the Protestants must know Our Lord a lot better since they call him by His first name all the time. But I also remembered the ending about 1/2 way through, so that took some wind out of the sails for this read. Still VERY enjoyable and I do disagree that this is a dunning work or stereotype Irish alcoholic tale. I did not find it that at all. I found Billy to be Billy.
But I have to admit, in my head he was always Dennis Leary in his "Rescue Me" role. I wanted him to have a fireman's cap instead of the work clothing for the shoe store.
You either seem to love Alice McDermott or hate her and call her work "tedious". I love it. And give me some of her "tedious" every day of the week. Good intent folks as the people I have known in great majority.
February 13, 2024
"It was just Billy's way: this need to keep in touch, to keep talking, to be called by name when he entered the crowded barroom, slapped on the back. Glad to see you, have a seat. The drink a warmth across the cheeks, a watery veil that only brought into relief the gleam on the bar, the light in the mirror, the sparkle of a bottle, silver-topped, amber-filled, as it was plucked from its spot among the rows and rows of bright, silver-topped bottles and poured out again."
The book opens at a luncheon after the funeral of charming Billy Lynch who died too young from alcoholism. His extended Irish-American family was remembering this wonderful storyteller who was a joy when he was sober. Was it just alcohol that killed him or was it the grief from losing Eve, the Irish nanny he met in the Hamptons the summer of 1945 after he returned from the war. His cousin and best friend, Dennis, was the only one who knew the whole story about the girl that Billy had loved.
Dennis' daughter narrates the story about Billy, her father, her grandfather who always had Irish immigrants sleeping on his couch, and their wives. The book is about important family connections, their dreams and disappointments, and their Faith.
Alice McDermott writes beautifully in this quiet, character-based novel. Her writing reminds me of William Trevor, another author who writes literary fiction about the Irish. "Charming Billy" does not have a fast-paced plot, but it's a moving story about a flawed, gregarious man and the important people in his life.
The book opens at a luncheon after the funeral of charming Billy Lynch who died too young from alcoholism. His extended Irish-American family was remembering this wonderful storyteller who was a joy when he was sober. Was it just alcohol that killed him or was it the grief from losing Eve, the Irish nanny he met in the Hamptons the summer of 1945 after he returned from the war. His cousin and best friend, Dennis, was the only one who knew the whole story about the girl that Billy had loved.
Dennis' daughter narrates the story about Billy, her father, her grandfather who always had Irish immigrants sleeping on his couch, and their wives. The book is about important family connections, their dreams and disappointments, and their Faith.
Alice McDermott writes beautifully in this quiet, character-based novel. Her writing reminds me of William Trevor, another author who writes literary fiction about the Irish. "Charming Billy" does not have a fast-paced plot, but it's a moving story about a flawed, gregarious man and the important people in his life.
August 5, 2024
Beloved Billy has died in his cups and we take a soulful amble through his life and his impact on the people in it as seen through the narrative of his best friend's daughter. Beautifully told and heartfelt.
3 1/2 stars.
3 1/2 stars.
February 26, 2018
This was a beautiful novel with some top-notch prose. Not one word in this novel was pointless. This book was superbly written and a delight to read. It's a short read too. It's longer than Gatsby, but not by much.
The story starts at the end, after the funeral, and moves back in time revealing Billy's life and those that he left behind.
This novel had the best description I've ever read of why someone drinks and why someone stays with someone that drinks. While it was very specific to the characters, there was something universal about it being enough for both of them, some silent agreement where they asked only so much of each other. In essence it was what they both needed because maybe the truth is having someone fully there would have been too much.
The novel renders the arc of a seemingly unremarkable life - one where the victories are small and the trials are tempered with the delusion of the exclusivity of love, one that requires, as the author writes, a liar's courage. The truth is there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for love to seem inevitable. We give meaning where only the circumstantial mingling of coincidence and change reside.
The book lays out life and death as a reflection of the way things happen or don't in any one life, who we choose to love or don't, and the millions of little pathways we choose to embark on and how they are layered over the millions of other pathways our ancestors have taken before. It shows the impact of more than just Billy's death. It shows a funeral full of people seeing their own lives nearing the end and despite all the coupling and children and family and friends and hopes and dreams and accomplishments, they all seem a little lost.
The story starts at the end, after the funeral, and moves back in time revealing Billy's life and those that he left behind.
This novel had the best description I've ever read of why someone drinks and why someone stays with someone that drinks. While it was very specific to the characters, there was something universal about it being enough for both of them, some silent agreement where they asked only so much of each other. In essence it was what they both needed because maybe the truth is having someone fully there would have been too much.
The novel renders the arc of a seemingly unremarkable life - one where the victories are small and the trials are tempered with the delusion of the exclusivity of love, one that requires, as the author writes, a liar's courage. The truth is there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for love to seem inevitable. We give meaning where only the circumstantial mingling of coincidence and change reside.
The book lays out life and death as a reflection of the way things happen or don't in any one life, who we choose to love or don't, and the millions of little pathways we choose to embark on and how they are layered over the millions of other pathways our ancestors have taken before. It shows the impact of more than just Billy's death. It shows a funeral full of people seeing their own lives nearing the end and despite all the coupling and children and family and friends and hopes and dreams and accomplishments, they all seem a little lost.
February 25, 2010
This book should have been a short story, instead it was a novel that dragged on and on. The narrator is the second cousin of Charming Billy and is somehow telling the story of Charming Billy to her husband (as we find out) in the end. Disjointed, painful and scattered, I will never read another book by this author as I was scarred so much by this experience. Ugh.
The story was very repetitive, and I would never have finished it, were we not reading this for book club.
I wonder if the author tried to tell this story in the way that many Irish tell stories - repeating the main points again and again, and tying characters in here and there, and tossing in other characters with no explanation. For example, we learn all about Dennis' mother, and Dan Lynch gets very little background. In fact, it took me several chapters to figure out that Dan and Billy were brothers.
The author disregards the classic advice of English teachers all over the country and tells - not shows- us how charming Billy was. Billy lost his great love, Eva, to typhoid fever, he believes and so the natural tendency he (and apparently all Irish have blah, blah blah) had to drink becomes alcoholism, but semi-functioning alcoholism. He ends up marrying spinster Maeve, and only when the drinking gets so bad does he travel to Ireland with his priest to "take the pledge" to quit drinking. While in Ireland, he discovers that Eva is alive, has been alive all along, and used the money he had sent for their wedding instead to open a gas station with her husband. From what I could tell in the book, his alcoholism does not get worse after that, but you might think it would.
Why the narrator is telling her husband all the things that he should and might already know, and refers to her own father-in-law in the narration as Mr. West (which is sooo RIDICULOUS!) just made this book tedious. A surprise ending that doesn't make sense? Sheesh.
The only enjoyable part of the story is that her widowed father Dennis ends up marrying Maeve. You tend to think that Maeve has spent most of her life in the shadow of dead women - first Eva and then Dennis' dead wife. Complicated, practical, accidental marriages - what an awful world they live in. I was glad when this book was over.
The story was very repetitive, and I would never have finished it, were we not reading this for book club.
I wonder if the author tried to tell this story in the way that many Irish tell stories - repeating the main points again and again, and tying characters in here and there, and tossing in other characters with no explanation. For example, we learn all about Dennis' mother, and Dan Lynch gets very little background. In fact, it took me several chapters to figure out that Dan and Billy were brothers.
The author disregards the classic advice of English teachers all over the country and tells - not shows- us how charming Billy was. Billy lost his great love, Eva, to typhoid fever, he believes and so the natural tendency he (and apparently all Irish have blah, blah blah) had to drink becomes alcoholism, but semi-functioning alcoholism. He ends up marrying spinster Maeve, and only when the drinking gets so bad does he travel to Ireland with his priest to "take the pledge" to quit drinking. While in Ireland, he discovers that Eva is alive, has been alive all along, and used the money he had sent for their wedding instead to open a gas station with her husband. From what I could tell in the book, his alcoholism does not get worse after that, but you might think it would.
Why the narrator is telling her husband all the things that he should and might already know, and refers to her own father-in-law in the narration as Mr. West (which is sooo RIDICULOUS!) just made this book tedious. A surprise ending that doesn't make sense? Sheesh.
The only enjoyable part of the story is that her widowed father Dennis ends up marrying Maeve. You tend to think that Maeve has spent most of her life in the shadow of dead women - first Eva and then Dennis' dead wife. Complicated, practical, accidental marriages - what an awful world they live in. I was glad when this book was over.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2008
Maybe I'm getting impatient as I age, but like so many recent novels, this one seemed about 100 pages too long to me. I was done with the story by the time of the family gathering after the post-funeral reception. The writing became repetitive after that.
The story was pretty good at the beginning, though, and the descriptions of the post-war days were beautiful. Having been raised in an Irish Catholic family, with lots of great aunts and great uncles and assorted relatives showing up whenever we visited with my grandparents, the dialogue and settings were very familiar and comfortable. I almost laughed at the comment about the ever-present depictions of the Sacred Heart, one of which graced my grandmother's upstairs hall for decades and decades. But, this was not a deep or meaningful study of love and loss. It was an expose of Billy's foibles, his charms and his weaknesses. It's not at all clear that the narrator got much out of her family history.
The story was pretty good at the beginning, though, and the descriptions of the post-war days were beautiful. Having been raised in an Irish Catholic family, with lots of great aunts and great uncles and assorted relatives showing up whenever we visited with my grandparents, the dialogue and settings were very familiar and comfortable. I almost laughed at the comment about the ever-present depictions of the Sacred Heart, one of which graced my grandmother's upstairs hall for decades and decades. But, this was not a deep or meaningful study of love and loss. It was an expose of Billy's foibles, his charms and his weaknesses. It's not at all clear that the narrator got much out of her family history.
September 30, 2021
I'm kind of surprised I like this book as much as I did, as it was slow moving and not terribly exciting. But the writing was beautiful and it drew me in.
Imagine you're friends with someone. You've met some of their relatives and heard family stories. Then you go to the wake for their old, drunken Uncle Billy. Later at the repast lunch (at an Irish pub, of course) you get the scoop on Billy's life and all these old family secrets and scandals are revealed.
You'd get kind of drawn in, in spite of yourself. And if you didn't always understand who was related to who, or the chronology of events, it would still be interesting. That's how reading this book felt to me.
Imagine you're friends with someone. You've met some of their relatives and heard family stories. Then you go to the wake for their old, drunken Uncle Billy. Later at the repast lunch (at an Irish pub, of course) you get the scoop on Billy's life and all these old family secrets and scandals are revealed.
You'd get kind of drawn in, in spite of yourself. And if you didn't always understand who was related to who, or the chronology of events, it would still be interesting. That's how reading this book felt to me.
August 29, 2007
thoughts i didn't know i shared with every other child of an irish american growing up in the five boroughs
March 14, 2020
I once read somewhere that, when Alice McDermott’s novel Charming Billy was published in 1998, some MFA programs used the first chapter as a model for their students in fiction workshops. It’s a long chapter as chapters now tend to go, at 27 pages, but, set in a small bar in the Bronx after Billy’s funeral, it’s lovely.
Marked by the loss of an early love, Billy Lynch, broken by alcoholism, died as a man loved by everyone. “If you knew Billy at all,” says Mickey Quinn to the rest of the funeral party, “then you loved him. He was just that kind of guy.” The novel is narrated by the daughter of Billy’s close cousin, Dennis, and the narrative, with a startling revelation of a life-long deceit at the close of the first chapter, explores Billy’s life and the lives of those close to him. The prose is beautiful—McDermott’s finest, I think. Charming Billy is a novel that will not let go of you. It has certainly haunted me for the two decades since I read it.
Marked by the loss of an early love, Billy Lynch, broken by alcoholism, died as a man loved by everyone. “If you knew Billy at all,” says Mickey Quinn to the rest of the funeral party, “then you loved him. He was just that kind of guy.” The novel is narrated by the daughter of Billy’s close cousin, Dennis, and the narrative, with a startling revelation of a life-long deceit at the close of the first chapter, explores Billy’s life and the lives of those close to him. The prose is beautiful—McDermott’s finest, I think. Charming Billy is a novel that will not let go of you. It has certainly haunted me for the two decades since I read it.
January 30, 2009
This was a slow read for a bit and then you start to get involved with the characters. Billy had his faults as an alcoholic but he was very loving and very well loved in return. He had a sad life in many respects, but he passed on his love to others,unafraid, in ways that were unique and lovely. Alice McDermott brings it all together at the end. She has us contemplate our heritage, our family and all those that have passed on when she writes through Billy:"Another thing about Ireland, we're all over there. All our faces. I saw your dad driving a Guinness truck in Dublin. And his dad was moving a herd of sheep across the road up in the northwest. I saw my mother in nearly every shop I went into, usually behind the counter. And my father's face was on one of the priests whs said Mass at the retreat house.Uncle Jim. Bridie Shea as a girl again. Wouldn't that be a gift for poor Bridie, to be a girl again? Sitting up there in her mother's window the way she used to. Not a care in the world. I told Father Jim that is was like a taste of the hereafter,going over there." And my favorite sentence:"My father would say it himself in another six or seven years' time, as we sat together on these steps again and I watched our children playing crochet on the lawn,wondering, counting, how many more years would such summers continue, my father alive, our children still children, how many more were enough."
May 28, 2020
The plot is all in the first chapter. You'd better be aware of that. The magic of this book is the beautiful writing and the depth in the relationships between characters so real and so human you will feel like you know them already from somewhere.
May 19, 2009
For the first time in awhile this book wasn't for one of my book clubs. It's too bad because as soon as I finished it, I really wanted to talk about it with someone. Alice McDermott did a reading at the library where I work about a month ago. She read a short story that is soon to be published. I really liked it and since I normally am not a fan of short stories, I decided it was high time I checked out some of her novels. I started with Charming Billy because it is probably her most well-known. The story starts at Billy's funeral and then weaves back and forth through time with telling of Billy's life from the time he returned from WWII until his death from alcoholism. Part of the story are told by people attending the funeral who reminisce about Billy and others are narrated by the daughter of Billy's cousin Dennis. The parts narrated by the daughter threw me sometimes because it wasn't always obvious that she was narrating and then it was hard to figure out who some of the pronouns were referring to. Although that was a bit awkward at times, it didn't detract much from the narrative for me. After hearing McDermott read some of her work in person I could really hear her voice in this book. I found it to be beautifully written and very lyrical. And some of the descriptions of mundane things enriched it for me, instead of seeming superfluous as things like that can do at the hands of lesser writer. Ultimately I viewed the book as asking the question whether we are destined to be what we become or if things might have been different if circumstances had been different. That was what I really wanted to discuss when I was done with the book. I highly recommend this for anyone who likes character based literary fiction.
March 23, 2009
If despair is the only unforgivable sin, than the characters in Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy have freely damned themselves to hell. On the plus-side, Charming Billy has great nostalgic descriptions of New York City and its Irish-Catholic community. McDermott weaves a story centered on Billy and the long-term effects of the loss of his summer heart throb Eva. The novel skillfully jumps from era to era revealing the ramifications of Eva’s loss on Billy and others. But the book gets harder and harder to pick up as its unrelenting message is about embracing defeat and the celebration of misery. The dénouement itself is the final act in a life resigned to surrender.
The characters are in perpetual anguish and an all-encompassing pathos fueled by self-pity, alcoholism and religious fatalism. They toil at jobs they don’t like, marry people they don’t love and drink themselves to death. I don’t deny the cruel vicissitudes of real life, but most people try to better their unfortunate circumstances - not bask in them. There is no joy. McDermott’s world is one of a self-indulgent wallowing in defeat where suffering is spuriously noble. Every gathering is a melancholy affair and the reaffirmation of a life-of-pain. The most poignant moment of the novel is when someone spontaneously sings Danny Boy at a funeral. If this sounds like your life – move.
The only character that breaks this endless despair is a German shoe store owner. As a descendent of Irish Americans, I felt more empathy with his hard work and eye toward the future. I doubt Irish sensibilities are as dark as McDermott paints them. Bracing up and pressing on is an anathema in Charming Billy. This gets hard to take. I’m no Pollyanna and enjoy a tragic tale, but Charming Billy lacks the passion of Romeo and Juliet, the endurance of My Antonia and the pride of The Scarlett Letter.
The characters are in perpetual anguish and an all-encompassing pathos fueled by self-pity, alcoholism and religious fatalism. They toil at jobs they don’t like, marry people they don’t love and drink themselves to death. I don’t deny the cruel vicissitudes of real life, but most people try to better their unfortunate circumstances - not bask in them. There is no joy. McDermott’s world is one of a self-indulgent wallowing in defeat where suffering is spuriously noble. Every gathering is a melancholy affair and the reaffirmation of a life-of-pain. The most poignant moment of the novel is when someone spontaneously sings Danny Boy at a funeral. If this sounds like your life – move.
The only character that breaks this endless despair is a German shoe store owner. As a descendent of Irish Americans, I felt more empathy with his hard work and eye toward the future. I doubt Irish sensibilities are as dark as McDermott paints them. Bracing up and pressing on is an anathema in Charming Billy. This gets hard to take. I’m no Pollyanna and enjoy a tragic tale, but Charming Billy lacks the passion of Romeo and Juliet, the endurance of My Antonia and the pride of The Scarlett Letter.
October 17, 2023
So the first chapter was incredible and it was only improved upon with the final chapter. I would add in quotes and all that but really, that whole final chapter was just amazing with the exception of a few lines that were even better than that.
The second paragraph of final chapter included this which I have to note:
"The gravel driveway was scattered with puddles. The road out back was still black from all the rain that had guaranteed Billy's swift ascent into heaven, but it was drying out now, a no-longer-solid brushstroke that by noon would have feathered back into dust along its edges. A road that on the hottest days gave off the same sharp odor it had had the moment it was spread. And swimming heat waves, of course, earth agitating air."
And the final line:
"As if, in that wide-ranging anthology of stories that was the lives of the saints...what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all."
I just love the character sketches, the relationships, the rawness and pain of some of the relationships, but most of all, the honesty. Relationships are not perfect and to fake like they are, is a disservice to all involved. I couldn't always follow the voice and was a little lost at who was telling the story at times and who the narrator was telling it to. With that, I did feel it got a little preachy, though that might not be the right word. But the sentiment always right on and the dynamics between people and who knew what, and who told what to whom, was just brilliant.
This is definitely one of those stories where you feel so normal at the end and as though everyone else in the world is too. That there isn't perfection out there, just the drive to be happy and content, because that's really all you need.
The second paragraph of final chapter included this which I have to note:
"The gravel driveway was scattered with puddles. The road out back was still black from all the rain that had guaranteed Billy's swift ascent into heaven, but it was drying out now, a no-longer-solid brushstroke that by noon would have feathered back into dust along its edges. A road that on the hottest days gave off the same sharp odor it had had the moment it was spread. And swimming heat waves, of course, earth agitating air."
And the final line:
"As if, in that wide-ranging anthology of stories that was the lives of the saints...what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all."
I just love the character sketches, the relationships, the rawness and pain of some of the relationships, but most of all, the honesty. Relationships are not perfect and to fake like they are, is a disservice to all involved. I couldn't always follow the voice and was a little lost at who was telling the story at times and who the narrator was telling it to. With that, I did feel it got a little preachy, though that might not be the right word. But the sentiment always right on and the dynamics between people and who knew what, and who told what to whom, was just brilliant.
This is definitely one of those stories where you feel so normal at the end and as though everyone else in the world is too. That there isn't perfection out there, just the drive to be happy and content, because that's really all you need.
August 15, 2012
Judging from the reviews on Amazon.com, readers either really liked this book and gave it 5 stars or didn't like it at all and gave it one or two. I fall in the former camp. Those who didn't like the book said it was "confusing", complained that the narrator was a minor character directing her discourse to her husband who barely makes an appearance in the book. It lacked plot and a strong story line. I agree that here and there it was a bit confusing but found the novel moved along and held my interest despite the fact that the broad outline of the story is unveiled early on. What does unfold over time is the portrait of two generations of a large New York Irish family and their friends. Charming Billy's life, and that of his life-long cousin and friend Dennis, are sketched out through observations of others, direct conversations, remembrances, intuitions, facts and opinions, gossip. What the reader is left with is a lyrical, sad, sometimes funny, description of ordinary life, with all its ephemeral joys, triumphs, and inevitable disappointments.
January 11, 2009
Nothing charming about it.
September 9, 2023
Not sure what to say about this one. A heartbreaking slice of life, I guess.
September 9, 2009
This is the story of Billy Lynch, an Irish American from Queens, NY and his many family members and friends. Billy was jilted as a young man and never quite got over the pain, as he drank himself to death many years later. The story was told from the point of view of Billy's cousin Dennis' daughter, which is really confusing and difficult to figure out until at least halfway through the story.
I noticed that both descriptions of this novel (the one on Goodreads and the one on the back cover of the book itself) describe the book differently than I would have--almost as though the person who wrote it hadn't read it!
That said, I thought the writing was beautiful. I am always a fan of flowery prose! The problem is that the writer was all over the place with the story. At times, the voice seemed to change. I often found myself re-reading sections because I felt like I was missing something. From the way the book cover sounded, I thought that Billy's friends and relatives were going to take turns telling stories about his life and that each person may have had a different take on things. The story skipped around so much, I had a hard time following it.
I am sad because this book had the potential to be one of my all-time favorites, containing: ethnic flare, family dysfunction and lovely prose. However, the way the story is told falls a bit short, leaving the reader quite a bit unfulfilled.
I noticed that both descriptions of this novel (the one on Goodreads and the one on the back cover of the book itself) describe the book differently than I would have--almost as though the person who wrote it hadn't read it!
That said, I thought the writing was beautiful. I am always a fan of flowery prose! The problem is that the writer was all over the place with the story. At times, the voice seemed to change. I often found myself re-reading sections because I felt like I was missing something. From the way the book cover sounded, I thought that Billy's friends and relatives were going to take turns telling stories about his life and that each person may have had a different take on things. The story skipped around so much, I had a hard time following it.
I am sad because this book had the potential to be one of my all-time favorites, containing: ethnic flare, family dysfunction and lovely prose. However, the way the story is told falls a bit short, leaving the reader quite a bit unfulfilled.
February 1, 2013
Charming, much-beloved Billy Flynn has finally had one too many once too often and (as everyone knew he someday would) has drunk himself to death. His friends and family gather in a restaurant after the funeral, then move on to the widow's house, and stories of Billy flow like the whiskey that killed him. A picture emerges of his life, and especially of the tragedy that haunted it for decades: the death of the young woman he fell in love with in his youth and wanted to marry. Or...is it possible she didn't really die? The story is full of the ordinary sweetness and sadness of life: ordinary love, ordinary loss, ordinary reversals and betrayals. And yet it's told with such meticulousness and affection, in language so precise and beautiful, that you begin to really care about Billy, with all his quiet virtues (especially his faith, loyalty, and sensitivity) and all his obvious flaws (his inflexibility and stubborn self-deceit as much as the drinking). I don't think I've read any of McDermott's books before, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for another--I really enjoyed this.
March 16, 2012
I haven't read a book I liked less.
This, however, may not be a reflection on the author. Maybe I just didn't "get it." For a story with some legs - old drunk guy who had a great-looking fiance who suddenly died, but was not dead and instead bought a gas station - I felt like it was crippled by a smattering of things - It was very bland, like undressed cooked Velveeta's and Cheese, except for I'd rather eat a boxes of that until I explode and form one big, floppy, wet shell, than ever read another book like this.
That's my opinion, and it does not reflect the author's talent for writing, just my perception of her talent for writing.*
*This reviewer has never, in fact, read anything else by Alice McDermott, so she is - in fact - not at all qualified to evaluate it.
This, however, may not be a reflection on the author. Maybe I just didn't "get it." For a story with some legs - old drunk guy who had a great-looking fiance who suddenly died, but was not dead and instead bought a gas station - I felt like it was crippled by a smattering of things - It was very bland, like undressed cooked Velveeta's and Cheese, except for I'd rather eat a boxes of that until I explode and form one big, floppy, wet shell, than ever read another book like this.
That's my opinion, and it does not reflect the author's talent for writing, just my perception of her talent for writing.*
*This reviewer has never, in fact, read anything else by Alice McDermott, so she is - in fact - not at all qualified to evaluate it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2022
Beautifully structured like delicate origami, each fold a new facet to the lives contained in this novel, that of the eponymous subject, Billy, whose funeral opens the book, and all whose lives were entwined with his, bound by blood and long acquaintance, by shared memories, and religion. A novel about this extended Irish-American family, their love, faith, memories, and grief, and at its center, though we learn of it at the end of the first chapter, a lie, told out of love, that might have changed the course of a life, reverberating intensely through the years. Bracing, eloquent, unsettling, and wonderful.
November 15, 2023
Yep. Oh wow. When the last 10 pages keep you guessing and hoping and wondering… WOW
When you burst into tears for the perfection, the agony, the sweet OF COURSe THANK GOD resolution for whatever this mess of many lives intertwined became because thus the paths lead.
When you burst into tears for the perfection, the agony, the sweet OF COURSe THANK GOD resolution for whatever this mess of many lives intertwined became because thus the paths lead.
June 25, 2015
Charming Billy is a National Book Award Winner. In this novel, McDermott develops the entirety of the book on remembrances after the funeral of Billy. Billy Lynch is hopelessly alcoholic, hopelessly Irish Catholic, and hopelessly romantic (Yeats being a favorite which he has been able to recite since childhood). And he is loved by all. Though much around him is, indeed, less than encouraging, Billy never loses hope personally; however, his impact on so many others is deep and wide, generous and needy.
I especially like the Irish characters and culture as McDermott acquaints the reader through the many stories that have gone unspoken or re-created in characters' views of what should be done, rather than what is or has been.
And in describing two elderly sisters as Billy is quoted, the words can be descriptive of many in these tales: They "should have wisdom enough to know that passion gone cold, gone way beyond its prime, was a pathetic thing." And later Billy is remembered to have said, [it was] "because one (you might say) hsd given too much and the other had given too little. That was it--all that remained of their lovely idyll in this lovely place. Faith inspired by anger outstripping any inspired by affection."
Nonetheless, I left this book feeling happy to have known and welcomed such a giving and loved--and yes, charming Billy.
I especially like the Irish characters and culture as McDermott acquaints the reader through the many stories that have gone unspoken or re-created in characters' views of what should be done, rather than what is or has been.
And in describing two elderly sisters as Billy is quoted, the words can be descriptive of many in these tales: They "should have wisdom enough to know that passion gone cold, gone way beyond its prime, was a pathetic thing." And later Billy is remembered to have said, [it was] "because one (you might say) hsd given too much and the other had given too little. That was it--all that remained of their lovely idyll in this lovely place. Faith inspired by anger outstripping any inspired by affection."
Nonetheless, I left this book feeling happy to have known and welcomed such a giving and loved--and yes, charming Billy.
December 31, 2015
Close friends and family come together to mourn and remember Billy, a man of Irish descent who fell for an Irish lass one summer, who promised himself to her and sent her the money so she could return to him after she went back to Ireland. It was a short romance, but one that everyone present at his wake had an opinion on, no one really knowing the full truth of what really transpired.
The novel unfolds and weaves like threads in a tapestry, as characters share their understanding of Billy, their memories of his charm and inclinations and what they knew about the short-lived romance with the Irish girl Eva. Slowly it creates a picture of a life and all lives, how they are formed, changed, steered by certain events, fractured by grief, sustained by community, vulnerable to and comforted by addiction, driven by faith, seduced by deception.
A nostalgic tale, imbued with sadness, post war expectations and a new world Irish charm, it carries a sense of stepping back in time, of being on the threshold of a new modern era, Billy, one of the last links to a bygone era.
The novel unfolds and weaves like threads in a tapestry, as characters share their understanding of Billy, their memories of his charm and inclinations and what they knew about the short-lived romance with the Irish girl Eva. Slowly it creates a picture of a life and all lives, how they are formed, changed, steered by certain events, fractured by grief, sustained by community, vulnerable to and comforted by addiction, driven by faith, seduced by deception.
A nostalgic tale, imbued with sadness, post war expectations and a new world Irish charm, it carries a sense of stepping back in time, of being on the threshold of a new modern era, Billy, one of the last links to a bygone era.
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