Charming Billy

Set in the New York Irish community, "Charming Billy" is Alice McDermott's golden egg. Delving into the world with subtlety the writer, known for her quiet prose, won both an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction for this novel.

McDermott manages to give us a book that she seemingly wrote with no hands - it feels like a verbal account of lives that thrill and suck us right in. She makes you sit close up and really listen, not just hear, with paragraphs like these:

"Billy had drunk himself to death. He had, at some point, ripped apart, plowed through as alcoholics tend to do, the great, deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room."

Spoiler alert: As we see the parting of Billy, we also experience the surge of his first (and probably only) true love, Eva. Billy is the Irish clich�: He drinks too much, and eventually drinks himself to death as the rest of his world watches him self destructing. Possibly because he is such a romantic, or because absolutely every body loves him (and can't help it), the usual saving-the-drunk-guy incitement doesn't happen. Nobody will save him, not even himself.

The story itself is heartbreak city. Billy meets Eva, he falls in love. Billy promises Eva he will send for her and bring her back to New York, and there will be the happy ever after scenario. What does actually happen is Eva marries someone else, but luckily Billy is misinformed (read: Lied to) and thinks that his love has died from pneumonia.

The book is about belief, really. What we chose to believe in? Is it love, or is it the idea of love? Does Billy promise this in order to have something meaningful to do with his life, a sort of sense of purpose, or does he truly love Eva? Those are the questions that the author opens up; she turns the tide towards the reader and lets you flounder with the very thoughts. Love is reevaluated, and so is this concept of love -- the very construction of them both is what comes unraveled. It kills Billy; what will it do to you?

"Charming Billy"
Alice McDermott
$9.81
Picador