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Get Free Ebook Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott

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Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott

Get Free Ebook Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott

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Amazon.com Review

Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity, and resignation's hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens, New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve." After World War II, both young men had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family--"marveling, marveling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives." By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the U.S., Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anesthesia of alcohol. Alice McDermott's quiet, striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial wishes. She seems far less interested in the shock of revelation than in her characters' power to live through personal disaster. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide.

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From Library Journal

When Billy, the glue of a tight Irish community in New York, dies as a result of lifelong alcohol abuse, mourners gather around roast beef and green bean amandine to tell tales and ruminate on his struggle for happiness after he lost his first love, Eva. With carefully drawn character studies and gentle probing, McDermott, who won the National Book Award for this work, masterfully weaves a subtle but tenacious web of relationships to explore the devastation of alcoholism, the loss of innocence, the daily practice of love, and the redeeming unity of family and friendship. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 280 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (December 31, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0374913900

ISBN-13: 978-0374913908

ASIN: 0374120803

Product Dimensions:

6 x 1.2 x 9 inches

Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.7 out of 5 stars

218 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#288,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Charming Bill has some of the most beautiful writing I've read in a long time. I marked numerous passages, especially one crystalline paragraph that summed up all the joys and sorrows of life so beautifully it practically made me weep. It is an Irish Catholic elegy for a post-war generation and individual lives and marriages that crashed on the shoals of alcoholism, unrequited love, and the limits of the American Dream. Not five stars because it got quite repetitive by the end and I saw every major plot development coming from a mile or five away. You have to love literary fiction to love this book and the be willing to let the flow of the language carry you along through lives that are made up more of daily joys and sorrows than great events.

Alice McDermott's novels take a deep long look at a character sharing his/her love, hopes, desires, failures. We view "the typical course [of love] from early infatuation to serious love to affection, occasionally diminshed by impatience and disagreement, bolstered by interdependence, fanned now and then by fondness, by humor."[p 45]Here she takes on "Billy [who] 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."[p 4] The "everyone in the room" here is a tavern where a lunch is served after Billy's funeral.Billy's life is told by the daughter of Dennis one of Billy's cousins - the one most responsible for helping him through his life and for helping Billy's wife, Maeve, through life. "Billy was for me then merely one of my father's legion of cousins, distinguished not so much by his alcoholism (it had seemed to me that there were more alcoholics among them than there were Republicans, or even redheads)" [p 42]. Billy was indeed charming - everyone loved him and made allowances for him.[SPOILER ALERT]The pivotal moment in Billy's life - at least as viewed by his extended family - took place shortly after World War II. Dennis and Billy are out on Long Island working on a cottage owned by Dennis' mother's second husband. While at the beach one day they meet a couple of Irish girls. Billy falls in love with one, but she returns to Ireland. Billy sends her money hoping to bring her back. But she stays in Ireland and marries a man there. Dennis finds out. Trying to spare Billy's feelings, and trying to save Billy from years of gossip and talk, Dennis tells Billy the girl died. Billy eventually marries another woman, the plain Maeve, but he may still carry a flame for the Irish girl.What course did this lie set Billy on? Would he have been an alcoholic anyway? How would his life have been different? As Dennis and another cousin, Dan Lynch, discuss the matter Dennis tries to close off that avenue of thought. "It might have been his natural disinclination to wholeheartedly agree with Dan Lynch about anything. It might have been his reluctance to consider the possibility that the lie he'd told Billy all those years ago was not merely the cause of thirty years of pointless grief but the very thing that had made Billy's life with Maeve possible, and fruitless."[p 193][END SPOILER ALERT]I especially like McDermott's point of view telling this story. She starts with a few conversations between family members at the gatherings just after the death but in a blink switches back in time to the events being discussed. It's also interesting to hear the story told of a man who had just died - we can't see his point of view because he is gone. We see the life through the eyes of others.I thoroughly enjoy Alice McDermott's studies on life and love. While this book is excellent, if you want to start with her try Someone.

Almost as many 1 star reviews as 5 stars? For this book? I've looked up other National Book Award winners (as this book is) and saw that this is a recurring trend with Amazon book reviews: win an award and watch the negative reviews pile up. As for the book itself, I found it to be a moving story of family ties and the devastation of alcoholism. Alice McDermott is a very good writer and the book is full of quiet, lyrical passages like this one: "the dead were there with them, just outside the circle of light. Billy and Claire, not forgotten, no less mourned, but silent, for now, in dreams their faces always turned away, so that the course of other lives, the lives of those they loved, could be completed, could go on. Surely just as the Irish girl, whom Billy had loved when he was young, just back from the war, had eventually turned her face away." I would recommend this book to anyone to read. While it is a quiet character study full of talk and reminiscense, if anyone says that nothing happens in the book, all I can say is it does if you understand it.

That Night by Alice McDermott stayed with me for years after I read it, and I think I will think about Charming Billy for a while, too. The story's narrator is a tangential witness to the main events of the book, which provides some critical distance and a sense of how family folklore is understood and retold by subsequent generations. There isn't a lot of plot to the book, and some covering of well-worn ground (the family folklore) from different angles, but it comes together in a brilliantly imagined world that is bound by the past while trying to move forward.

I could not believe I had read the same book as the reviews posted within the book. They were Glowing and I had a hard time finishing the book. I persevered because I was reading it for book club. I did not really like the characters and had a hard time knowing who was speaking when the book hopped back and forth in time.

Alice McDermott is an excellent writer. She definitely writes about what she knows, i.e. there is not a line of dialogue that does not ring absolutely true. I grew up in the exact area of eastern Long Island that she describes with such accuracy and fondness, so that in itself gave me great pleasure. However, what makes this novel wonderful is its understated way of provoking the reader to think about profound topics and beliefs. The narrative deliberately comforts and disturbs at the same time.

While reading this book, I found my parents, aunts and uncles alive again in its pages, still struggling with the same problems, loves, hurts dreams and faith. I found it to be a riveting experience. I wanted to put it down, but found myself drawn in by it in much the way the past generations of my family must have felt drawn into the dramas they lived. The characters are true to life and the force their struggles and dreams exerted on them generation after generation seems only too believable. I found this painful to read but I hope to draw value from the experiences of this group of characters.

If you are Irish or of Irish decent, a must read. The author also is very descriptive and uses "pretty" language. Love it! The story is great for people who are not Irish also.

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