Charming Billy

Rating:
Summary: this won an award?????????
Review: I bought this book when I saw that it had won such a prestigious award and I have to wonder what were it's competitors? Bird goes to the dentist??? I tried and tried to read this book as nothing is more annoying than spending hard earned money on a bad book. I kept wondering throughout the read, what am I missing. Hello, where's the story here??? Save your money, assume the committee who handed out the award was asleep at the wheel and spend your money on a book with a PLOT.

Rating:
Summary: lighten up, huh
Review: Oh!, Where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy, Oh, where have you been, charming Billy? I have been to seek a wife, she's the joy of my young life, She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother. -Billy Boy

Alice McDermott pulled off a major upset when she beat out Tom Wolfe for the National Book Award this year. I know it sent me scurrying for her books to figure out what I was missing; having now read At Weddings and Wakes (1992) & Charming Billy, I'd have to say that Ms McDermott is a gifted writer whose "Irish-American angst" is not for me. I admire her ability to evoke memories of the suburban 50's & 60's, but her stories are so submerged in bathos that they become somewhat grating. After all, the stories--At Weddings and Wakes dwelt on a woman's disappointment in her marriage and her husband, Charming Billy tells the story of a supposedly charming drunkard, whose life was irreparably damaged by the purported death of a young love--are asking us to feel pity for people who, while things haven't worked out exactly as they hoped, are living lives of enormous privilege in America's Golden Age. As I read them, I found them pinioned by two Irish American memoirs: Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year (1997) and Frank McCourt's Angela Ashes. Goodwin treats much the same people, in much the same neighborhoods, but where McDermott is morose, Goodwin is effervescent. Goodwin clearly recognizes the extraordinary gift that she was handed, growing up during that time and even family tragedy can not dim the glow. Meanwhile, McCourt's book shows us people who do deserve some pity, children growing up in grinding poverty, but does not ask for it. His book is a triumphal rise from the gutter and a loving look back at what must have been an extremely difficult early life. Turn then to the pages of Charming Billy and we have a man drinking himself to death because the woman he knew for one week one summer did not end up as his wife. C'mon. There is a sense in which to write such elegaic stories about the "difficult" lives of these characters is to lie.

I anxiously await the novel where McDermott lightens up and recognizes how good she and her characters have had it in suburban America in the past forty years.

Grade: C-

Rating:
Summary: A Warm and Wise Investigation of Life
Review: On the afternoon of Billy Lynch's funeral, his family and friends gather at a New York restaurant to discuss this charismatic man whom "everyone loved" and who, apparently, "died of drink." Questions abound: Why would Billy drink himself to death? How unhappy was he in his marriage to the plain-but-faithful Maeve? And what of Eva, his first love? If Billy had managed to have a future with Eva, would his life have taken a different turn? Was Billy's pathetic outcome just a matter of fate?

The narrator of Charming Billy is a cousin-once-removed of the protagonist, the daughter of Billy's best friend, Dennis, and probably the author's alter ego. Although intelligent and perceptive, the narrator is also rather critical of the pride, prejudice, sexism, racism, faith and clannish behavior she observes in her elders.

Charming Billy is a wonderful story of second and third-generation Irish-Americans, most of whom are blood relatives and live and love and laugh and drink and work for Consolidated Edison in the Queens borough of New York City. In the hands of a lesser author, a book such as Charming Billy might be one in which we would soon lose interest, but McDermott, a wonderful writer, brings Billy to life as well as illuminating the lives of this tightly-knit Irish-American community.

The opening scene, in a restaurant following Billy's funeral, is a brilliant social satire reminiscent of James T. Farrell's stories about Irish-Americans in Chicago, Can All This Grandeur Perish, written in 1937. McDermott, however, is less scathing, more sentimental and humorous, than was Farrell.

The characters in Charming Billy are warmly and well-drawn. They all have names like Dennis and Danny and Kevin and Rosemary and Bridie and Maeve. They are patriotic Americans, to be sure, but still proud of their Irish heritage and some of them even speak with a brogue. Part of the value of this warm and wonderful novel lies in the concern and respect with which McDermott treats past and current Irish-American issues.

McDermott writes in prose so masterful that we can almost hear the delightful Irish lilt in the voices of the speakers. There is a beautifully rhythmic cadence that captures the ebb and flow of conversation perfectly and one that never fails to involve the reader on an intensely emotional level. At the post-funeral dinner, Billy's sister takes the pragmatic view that "Alcoholism isn't a decision, it's a disease, and Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve, whether he'd had kids nor not...Every alcoholic's life is pretty much the same." Billy's bachelor friend and drinking partner, Dan Lynch, defends Billy, taking a more romantic view of Billy's life: "I just don't think it credits a man's life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that's what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed...But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate."

Why did Billy Lynch's life turn out so miserably? Why did this charming and lovable man "die of drink?" That is the central mystery, the question on which this novel of personal revelation turns. As the narrator tries to make sense of Billy's life, she finds herself also investigating both her father's life and her own as well. As she uncovers first one fact and then another, the mystery of "why" and "why not" only deepens.

It cannot be denied that Billy Lynch was a man seduced by the bar. "A world where love...could be spoken of by a hand on the shoulder, a fresh drink placed on the bar, Good to see you, through welling tears, real ones now, Ah, Billy, it's always good to see you. Dark, sparkling, sprinkled with moments when the sound and smell and sight of the place...transported him, however briefly, to a summer night long ago when he was young and life was all promise."

Any sensitive reader will find Charming Billy a wonderful investigation into the motivations and mysteries of life and love as written by one of the best authors of the twentieth century.

Rating:
Summary: Charming Billy: engaging but not memorable
Review: This novel, which reflects on the life of now deceased alcoholic Billy, is told from the point of view of the daughter of Billy's best friend. This point of view, although seemingly removed from the situation, makes for a strongly constructed novel and allows us to peak into Billy's world through a somewhat objective observer. There is a tragedy to Billy's hopelessness that is difficult to ignore. Alice McDermott does a fine job of describing the losses in Billy's life, namely that of his first love, a young Irish woman whom Billy courts during her short stay as a nanny. Billy learns of her death shortly after her return to Ireland and the devastation never leaves him. The point of contention seems to lie in the cause of Billy's alcoholism: would he have been an alcoholic even if she had not been lost? The truth of course adds to the tragedy: she was not dead but had in fact married someone else. McDermott takes on this tendentious subject with skill. There is a subtlety to the book which allows it to avoid becoming melodramatic. Billy is characterized as all too human: he is both charming and obnoxious, both kind and cruel. Even with all of these strengths, I found the book lacked a proper development of Billy. McDermott teases us by presenting Billy the way she does. It makes us want to know much more than she gives us.

Rating:
Summary: Charming Billy, a page-turner? YES!
Review: I was surprised after reading this novel that so many Amazon reviewers felt otherwise. I grew up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood and the novel rang true in large and small details. I loved McDermott's catalogue of Irish cooking: the boiled potatoes, mashed turnips, steamed spinach, stringy ham. I attended school with classmates whose mothers, like Billy's, were miserable cooks who spent hours "toughening up a roast in the oven." I was a singular feature in the school lunchroom with sandwiches of peppers & eggs, meatballs, or genoa salami on thick slices of crusty Italian bread. McDermott's attention to detail evoked the mundane elements of growing up in the '50s and '60s: crocheted potholders, lace doilies, carefully mended Hummels, Legion of Mary widows with their plastic rainhats. Her observations were enhanced by exquisitely simple metaphors: Maeve with her "face as plain as butter," and Billy "listening like a priest" who "touched his red tie, as elegant as a pope."

I suppose what pressed upon me to keep turning the next page was my interest in decoding Billy's charm. Isn't there a Billy in everyone's life? He was an attractive, enigmatic dreamer marked by romantic notions, loyalty, faith in God, generosity, and easy manner (in so many ways, he reminded me of another favorite doomed and dipsomaniac character, Sebastian Flyte of "Brideshead Revisited"). Nonetheless, he was destructive, distressing, and a disappointment to his circle of extended family and friends. In contrast to his sainted Uncle Daniel, Billy's funeral was only moderately attended: 47 people attended the funeral banquet. Yet these 47 chose to forgive-- embrace, really-- Billy's faults and cherish a memory of him, one hand in his pocket and a glass pressed to his heart.

P.S. Loved Dennis's mother, Sheila; could care less about Dennis' daughter, the narrator.

Rating:
Summary: Boring,Save Your Money!!!
Review: I really wasted my money on this 6-cassette unabridged version. This is one of the worst book-on-tape I have listened too! It ranks up there with "The Pilots Wife", which was also very long and about nothing. There are to many characters to keep up with. The story is about everybody but Billy!!. And to top it all off, the narrator was horrible!!

Rating:
Summary: a stirring, lyrical novel
Review: Many of the criticisms of this book take issue with the fact that this story is not told in a straightforward way. I think that is what makes it such a fine novel -- from the opening scene when family members gather to remember Billy, the plot dances around a few major plot events to give the perspective of different family members. Along the way, the reader is given an inside view of several generations of this extended Irish family with moving portraits of loss and longing weaving their way through the narrative. The novel is very evocative and recreates an old fashioned New York/Long Island neighborhood of Irish friends and neighbors and their inextricable ties to each other. There are some heartbreaking scenes, particularly when Billy travels to Ireland to visit his old love's grave. The plot is not what makes this an enticing novel; rather it is the meandering plot line and side bars that give it depth and emotion.

Rating:
Summary: Charming
Review: Incredible character development. Through flashbacks and family members' stories, you are brought very deeply into the mind of Billy and those he was close to. Slow-moving and a little choppy, this book succeeds in bringing you very close not only to his family, but also to what it means to be Irish. There are so many different stories told here, and so many more that could be told. you are given a brief look into each characters' life and mind, and want to know more, but unfortunately the limitations of a novels' length prevent us from learning more about all but a few central figures. But just getting the opportunity to learn a little bit about those characters, and to learn much more about the main characters...and to feel like you're there, learning as the characters learn, is well worth it.

Rating:
Summary: This is a classic...
Review: I, too, am shocked at the people who didn't 'get' this book. I'm not Irish and I 'got' it and loved it. Several months after reading it I still think about its poignancy, it's wry, lilting style. I think this is book that will last - one of those "quiet" books teacher, librarians and critics will be recommending for years to come.

I loved the "secrets" in the book, how they unfolded. I loved the ending - it was handled beautifully and with humor. It held me right to the end, but perhaps there's another point to the readers' comments: as a writer, I read not just for the story, but for style and to learn how to write better myself. "Charming Billy" gave me insight into my own creative process, so maybe you could say that this is a writer's book - and that the author is a writer's writer. When I am published, I hope someone says that about me.

Rating:
Summary: Not one of Alice McDermott's best works
Review: The strong opening was effective and griping. Yet the pace was not maintained throughout the book. However, any one with a history of alcoholism in their family will identify with the book.