Charming Billy

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary writing. Dragged a bit at times. Worth read.
Review: McDermott's writing is wonderful. I found myself reading dialogue with a slight brogue. The booked dragged in the middle a bit but was well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: I'm glad I just borrowed this book from the library.
Review: I looked forward to knowing Maeve from the first page. Neither she, nor I, were fulfilled.

Rating:
Summary: What were the National Book Award people thinking?
Review: This book is like a cheap version of Angela'a Ashes. The book is hard to follow and not worth the time. Fortunately and mercifully, it is short.

Rating:
Summary: found confusing and obivous
Review: I thought this book was hard to read and the closure was obvious after chapter two. Plus the requent use of the happenstance and other off beat language I found distracting.

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Summary: This book was boring
Review: I thought about returning this to Amazon; but decided it was my choice. Why would anyone want to read about a funeral and all the dreay stuff that goes along with the family. I read for comfort and relaxation and to be entertained. Not this time

Rating:
Summary: Studious, thoughtful, well-composed
Review: I genuinely pity any readers baffled by Charming Billy's careful shuttling back and forth through varied decades and points of view. This particular technique is what art, especially literary art, is primed to do (see Conrad and Faulkner, McDermott's key influences in this regard)...but as always, there are none so blind as those who will not see. The novel is sad, thoughtful, openminded and even majestically calm, qualities all reflected in its prose. That said, Charming Billy is not flawless, as witness Billy's too-pat (no Irish pun intended) encounter in Ireland with you-know-who, and the book must ultimately take a back seat to *At Weddings and Wakes*, McDermott's masterpiece. I praise Charming Billy with faint damns.

Rating:
Summary: This is the best book I've read in a long time.
Review: Alice McDermott writes beautifully. Her characters absolutely came alive for me -- I felt as if I was sitting with them after the wake -- the conversations were so real. I had no problem following the flashbacks. The author does a beautiful job of weaving back and forth. The style of writing is the best I've read in a long time -- beautiful, poetic, lyrical. I couldn't put it down and have recommended it to everyone I know. I've ordered Alice McDermott's three other books.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly crafted, reminiscent of Joyce's The Dubliners.
Review: Alice McDermott is a writer's writer, a graceful weaver of a narrative that reminds me of James Joyce's The Dubliners for its concern with the web of familial relationships, ancient loves and disappointments that surround the doomed Billy. It is lyrical and richly human without ever falling into the trap of sentimentality.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written BUT no place to go
Review: I give plaudits to Alice McDermott's writing style -- she works hard to describe the feelings, flashbacks, and memories of Dennis' daughter as she reflects on the life and death of the tragicomedic character Billy Lynch. But her prose got bogged down into a journey into somewhere and nowhere. After a while, I got a headache simply trying to figure out just who McDermott was talking about. At the end, the message of the book was unclear -- was it about the need for redemption for a 30-year-old lie? was it about family values? was it about....what? Sorry to say, but this is certainly not one of her best works.

Rating:
Summary: As beautiful as form relates to content
Review: I, too, felt as some of the on-line reviewers did regarding the confusing nature of the initial narration and the stereotypical characters. Pushing through the novel, however, allows one to see how form and content are married in this work. This is, after all, a story that deals with alcaholism and working-class Irish in an age that is frought with stereotypical prejudice. By the completion of the novel, all is made clear; the initial confusion can be likened to an alcohol induced haze, and the reader learns that the characters are only stereotypical when not understood. The emerging clarity of the narrator points to that of an emerging sensibility of the next generation of this family. McDermott has done an outstanding job of marrying form and content in her work.