Charming Billy
by Alice McDermott
Summary
The novel opens in a bar in the Bronx after a funeral, forty seven mourners at long tables telling stories about Billy Lynch, and every story is the same story: Billy the sweet talker, Billy the letter writer, Billy who could make you feel like the only person in the room, Billy whom the drink killed, found dead on a street at sixty. His widow Maeve sits at the head of the table, patient as she was through thirty years of hauling him off floors, and around her the family conducts its real argument: what made him drink, and whether the answer excuses anything.
The mourners' answer is the legend at the book's centre. Young Billy, just back from the war, loved an Irish girl named Eva, saved to bring her over, and sent the money; word came back that she had died. That grief, the family gospel runs, is what he poured the rest of his life onto. But the narrator, daughter of Billy's cousin Dennis, knows what Dennis knows: Eva did not die. She took the money and married a man in Ireland, and Dennis, unable to hand his cousin that humiliation, invented the death, a mercy that hardened into a life sentence.
McDermott circles the lie for the whole novel, back through Queens kitchens and Long Island summers, weighing tenderness against truth without ever calling the verdict, and the last pages fold the narrator's own family into the pattern.
Around two hundred and eighty pages, quiet, precise and cumulative.
Best for readers who want the Irish American elegy done at the highest level, a whole community's faith and evasions gathered around one ruined, beloved man.
Historical Context & Significance
Charming Billy won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1998, an upset the papers enjoyed: the quietest book on a shortlist that included Tom Wolfe's much heralded A Man in Full, and the judges chose two hundred and eighty pages of Queens Irish grief over the year's loudest publishing event. It confirmed Alice McDermott, twice a Pulitzer finalist by then, as the poet laureate of a specific world: the Catholic outer boroughs of the postwar decades, rendered without either nostalgia or contempt.
Her method, oblique, communal, told in eddies rather than plot, has made her a writers' favourite; the faith at the centre of her books is treated as seriously as any American novelist has managed, belief and its consolations examined as lived practice rather than costume.
McDermott has kept working the seam since, After This, Someone, The Ninth Hour, each praised in the same slightly awed register, and Charming Billy remains the entry point: the argument between a merciful lie and a wasting truth, unresolved on purpose.