As I was reading a book by Alice McDermott about writing fiction, it occurred to me that it was time for me to read her book that won the National Book Award. And how glad I am that I did. There is nothing like that feeling of falling into a masterpiece of writing from the first moment.
SPOILER ALERT! I cannot write about this book without giving a revelatory summary first. In my defense when you read the book, you quickly learn the basic story. Billy, the central figure, has just died and we learn about him beginning at his funeral.
Shortly after he returned from the war, Billy met and fell in love with an Irish woman visiting her sister on Long Island. Eva soon returns to her family in Ireland. Billy takes a second job to raise $500 to bring her and her family members to the US. They exchanged letters and he sends her the money. His cousin Dennis was seeing Eva’s sister and learned that Eva was not coming to the US and was marrying someone in Ireland. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Billy the truth and instead told him that she had died. Billy began drinking more and more; he eventually married Maeve whose father was a raging alcoholic. When Billy went to Ireland 30 years later to take the pledge, he (of course) encountered Eva and learned that Dennis lied.
Billy is much loved; he is always in the midst of sending a note to friends and family and is always friendly and funny. I find it a bit of a stretch to think that someone who drinks to excess every night can truly charm others and suspect that in fact those who are most charmed are also dedicated drinkers.
One matter for consideration by all the Irish family members is whether Billy would have been such a serious alcoholic if he had known Eve threw him over rather than dying. Though he married Maeve, it was because she fit into his alcoholic life, not because he had given up the idea of the tragic loss of his loved one. One family member spoke of alcoholism as a disease, but that idea was dismissed. I appreciate that the author does not trying to make a case for what made Billy an alcoholic.
It is in the last third of the book that we hear the story of Billy encountering Eva in Ireland though we had long known that it happened. That was a memorable passage.
The majority of the book is written in the third person, but a narrator turns up briefly from time to time. She is Dennis’s daughter who tells her own observations of the tale and sometimes stories she has heard from others. At the end of the book she tells the story to her husband, whose father had been mentioned previously. These off-stage non-characters bring a pleasing variety to the storytelling.
Alice McDermott, Charming Billy, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 280 pages, 1998 (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.