Charming Billy

Rating:
Summary: BILLY DIDN'T CHARM ME
Review: Wonderfully evocative of a Queens, New York Irish family. I could imagine many of them living in an Archie Bunker-type neighborhood. I know it well having had an Irish relatives who lived in such a place and liked wakes as they afforded great opportunities to catch up with the family. The coversations rang true to my ears and some of the characters were well developed. I did not think Billy charming. He was a falling down drunk, and a manipulator who abused his wife and used his friends. Maeve's character was better developed and very sympathetic. She deserved the happy ending she received. Eva and the manner of the reunion were not credible. Dennis, while agreeable, never came alive for me. His daughter is a cipher. I would have liked to know more about her, her husband, where she lives, how many kids she has. People were introduced briefly and it was hard to keep them all straight. The convoluted style required slow and sometimes repeated readings to understand the author's meaning. This is not objectionable if the end result is worth the effort. Sometimes it was; often it was not. Switching back and forth in time and place was distracting and off-putting for this reader. I thought that there was much beauty in the descriptions and rather probing thoughts on questions of faith. I liked being in the company of people who reminded me of family members long gone. I, however, do not feel the book deserved such a distinguished award. For such an experienced writer Ms. McDermott should know better how to write lushly in a less convoluted style. A good editor could have pared down the run-on sentences and the many distracting bracketed phrases.

Rating:
Summary: Not-So-Charming
Review: McDermott is a skillful writer and weaves thoughtful plots with substance. However, Charming Billy seems to create a massive void between reader and character(s)...there was such distance between me and the story...I did not quite believe the caricature snapshots of how wonderfully charming Billy was...after all, he was drunk most of the time. AFter 30 years of drinking and allowing alcohol to become the most hotly pursued thing in one's life, I think the charm has probably worn off a bit(at least in the real world). I enjoyed the Irish Catholic humor, the narration for the most part, and the ironies. But just when I got a bit comfortable and enjoyed getting to know a character, McDermott switched voices, characters, and created a frustrating read.
I gave it 3 stars for the authentic effort, and McDermott's play on words. For the most part, it just "didn't work."

Rating:
Summary: lacking charm and construction
Review: The first chapter of this book has the quiet charm and colorful charactors one would expect, but it quickly devolves into a confused meander through side stories, secondary charactors and long passages (pages and chapters) of people sitting and telling the story to someone else - at a wake, a bar, etc, creating a distance between the reader and a flattening of any plot tension. This is heightened by the undefined narrator/lens figure. Yes, she is the daughter of Billy's good friend, but beyond being there as a witness to the conversations and reminiscences, she plays no narrative role, has no stake in the story, no life outside the story, in short, she is flat. Why McDermott chose this way to construct the story is beyond me - the occaisional interjections of the narrator's first person voice every 30 pages are a disruption that contributes nothing to the story.
The main story, of a man who is told by his best friend his fiancee has died, when she (we learn in first chapter) married someone else, could have been interesting, but it is never developed as other charactors' loves and work tales take over. The whole thing feels like listening to someone else's family stories where you don't really know who is who, and after awhile, don't care.

Rating:
Summary: Lush prose will eventually wear you down.
Review: Alice McDermatt has undeniable writing talent as demonstrated by the prose in this book. But after awhile the lush prose starts to weary you like too much sweet wine. Hemingway once referred to Fitzgerald's 'cheap Irish love of failure'. Boy, if he had only read 'Charming Billy'. As a Catholic of Irish descent, I'm getting real tired off all these tales about doomed, alcoholic Irish Catholic families. Billy's problem is that he is a fool (literally), who, can't or won't straighten himself out. I couldn't care about this guy who, for all his passivity, is an abusive, manipulative husband. Of course the usual bunch of enablers is around to watch Billy drink himself to death. The book has a forced, token redemption at the end when Billy's long-suffering widow marries his best friend. Is this book better than a lot of the trash on Amazon that gets 5 stars? Absolutely. But it must be judged as a serious, literary effort, not as a pulp novel. Using that criteria, I give it 2 stars.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderfully Written Novel
Review: Alice McDermott is a great writer and this novel about an Irish American alcoholic is a minor masterpiece. McDermott's style is to time slice anecdotes about Billy during thirty years of life. We meet the young charmer full of romantic yearnings about love. And we see the pathetic drunkard who full of Catholic dogma tries to quit drinking through love of Christ. While Billy is the title character, it is his cousin who is the star of the novel. I would urge anyone who has an interest in Irish Americana, Catholic fiction or just plain good writing to read the novel. You will enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: I am surprised at the negative reviews. This is a novel, but it is very philosophical. It's really about reality, what is "real"? What is romanticized or exaggerated? Especially in family histories passed down through the generations, what is the truth? Is there such a thing? Is it possible to decode it from all the tangled threads of people's recollections? Is there a way to make sense of people's memories, or of our own memories of "what really happened"? Just because you don't like the protagonists doesn't mean it isn't a good book. It makes you think. It makes you look at your own family stories and your own memories and see that each person's perception of the same events is quite different. Even someone who seems to be "hard headed", practical and "down to earth" is creating their own reality by taking that stance... using their imagination to try to strip away the imaginary. Read Wallace Stevens "The Plain Sense of Things" or Blake's "letter to John Trusler" and then reread this book.

Rating:
Summary: a thoughtful, well-written tale
Review: I knew in the middle of reading this story that I would not soon forget it. McDermott's book is full of questions that matter- what do we owe those we love? how do we create each other's histories and what effect do the stories told about us have? are truth and myth equally powerful in our daily lives? McDermott tells the story beautifully and lets readers come to their own conclusions and ponder their own histories.

Rating:
Summary: I can't see colors anymore
Review: The audiobook version of this title is a curious affair. At first I was confused because the voice Prichard uses for a number of the characters sounds almost exactly like the voice of that freaky little midget woman in The Exorcist. It took a while before I figured out that the characters were not supposed to be undead - rather, they were simply animated by Prichard using the worst Irish accent in the history of humankind.

On top of that, Prichard reads 60% of the sentences with an inflection of wry irony, as if the sentence contained some nugget whose foolish and accidental charms, though undetectable by most, were so glaringly obvious to her that she was forced to acknowledge them with a smirk and an upturned lip. This is a fine dramatic technique when used sparingly and appropriately, but not, for instance, when reading a restaurant menu.

Imagine what it would sound like if James Hetfield narrated a version of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" complete with antiquated English accent. This is uncomfortably close to the spirit of Prichard's recording.

The box says that Prichard is an actress. Consequently, my new conception of Hell is hanging upside down in a straight jacket from the ceiling of an intimate and overheated fringe theater above a Brixton curry house, forced to endure a playbill featuring Prichard and William Shatner in period costume performing a dramatic reading of "Jude the Obscure."

Uff da.

Rating:
Summary: Billy's not so charming
Review: Charming Billy is a book you may want to think twice about before picking up, not because it is a difficult read in the sense of language but because of the construction of the book. The author, Alice Dermott, might be charming at times with her colorful insights, vivid images and creative phrasing, but this book certainly was far from charming. McDermott is an accomplished writer, but in this book she tells the story completely backwards making it awkward at times and quite difficult to follow. I had to read a good fifty pages before I even had a clue as to what was going on in this book and who the character was who was being talked about. Not to mention that each chapter almost retells what the one before it did with maybe one more added detail to the story. So in essence, the reader might read the same sentences a dozen times. This book is not at all challenging with its very bland wording and frankly is quite boring with not a stagnant plot but a complete lack of one. The characters never get a chance to develop because the story never goes anywhere. I only finished reading the book because every once in a great while McDermott explodes in an intricate and almost poetic phrasing with the prize for finishing this book being that the end is the only part that can be considered good.

Obviously this book's main character is a man named Billy, who fell in love at a young age with a girl name Eva after coming back from war with his cousin, Dennis. Billy was fooled by his cousin into thinking she died of pneumonia and so Billy tries to live his life and go on without her. Dennis only tells Billy this lie to cover up for the fact that Eva moved on and got married to someone else. Dennis does not want his cousin to know that Eva used Billy's money, which was intended for other purposes, to start a business for her new husband. After years of struggling with the brutal lie that Eva died, Billy marries a woman named Maeve. Unfortunally, Billy could never see her the way he saw his first and true love Eva. Billy struggles with the demons of his past while trying to move on to a new life, which is why this book captures the struggles and pitfalls of depression and alcoholism portrayed through Billy's emotional character so well. This book is not the actual living of Billy, but rather others telling the stories that made up his life. I find it very interesting how McDermott does not make the book about mourning Billy's death but about celebrating his life. This book starts out very creatively in a pub in New York after Billy's funeral as guest reminisce about old times they had with Billy and about how Eva forever changed Billy's life when she broke his heart by dying.

I would recommend this book to any readers who thoroughly enjoy a challenge in figuring out story lines. I also think this book would be a must for any psychology majors because of how deep this book goes into the realm of life's struggles, depression, and the battle over the addiction of alcoholism. I give this book a two star rating and not a three only because I have read books that are average and this book just falls short of being an average book. There is insight into this book; the main problem is there simply is no plot or action of any kind and that the book flip-flops from present to past constantly losing the reader.

Rating:
Summary: Quiet book
Review: A quiet, reflective story about an alcoholic man's death. His friends and family reminisce, and whispered voices are heard from the past. I liked the way this book was written. 'Quiet' is the best way to put it. Read it!