The charming of the title does not reveal a helpless drunk living off the goodness of others with a sarcastic smirk, but a haunted figure who escapes with alcohol to a place where a future heaven is still possible and even touchable. His life has been one of blessed family, friends and relationships but dominated by alcoholism so pronounced that two of the main characters, his wife Maeve and his cousin Dennis have devoted most of their lives to his daily rescue. It’s a wonderful suggestion.īilly Lynch is very newly in his grave on page one of McDermott’s character study and family tale. You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.In the entry in Novelist Plus (see Dallas Public Library databases) for Alice McDermott, the suggestion, after an explanation of her style and work, is to “start with Charming Billy”. When you close the book and go to sleep, the next morning you wake up and you can't remember that you never knew Billy at all. Memory does not work in straight lines, nor should the art that reveals it. In her pages one encounters characters passing like paper ducks on a pond.ĭissolution and violence lie just beneath - psychic, emotional and often physical, and certainly the threat of all these. She gives you quiet successions of words that take shape in well-structured paragraphs, as if you the reader were watching her practicing origami. McDermott controls the tone through perfectly composed sentences. Instead, you feel with her, you partake in her emotions. She doesn't lead you to empathize or sympathize with Billy. All this is told not by a friend or a daughter, which would be too obvious, but by Dennis' daughter.
Because she unfolds her story slowly, and you learn about what happened only gradually, you discover with the narrator, the finder-outer, as it were, why Billy's melancholy ran so deep, and why a romance of sadness can seduce the young.
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