The ability of Charming Billy to tug those heartstrings, to prompt one to step back and take a look at one's life, is one of the major strengths of the novel. I also recognize the pain of having spent so much of one's life dedicated to something that turned out to have been different from what I had expected and hoped for. Hopefully it is a curable trait, although at my age, I seriously doubt any such cure, even if found, would apply. The book captures that ennui well, and I recognize it in myself, having grown up in the culture she describes. Of course, they might not have wound up any better. I found myself wishing or wondering about a choice made a lifetime ago and how things might have turned out had I decided otherwise. I was surprised that I felt mostly unmoved, but then, towards the end, when people realize the waste they have made of their lives, it struck a chord, or maybe was busy tuning up the entire bloody orchestra, and I was weepy as I turned the pages, pausing frequently with uncomfortable recognition. The book describes the culture of its New York Irish Catholic characters (my peeps) through their relationships with each other. The narrator is the daughter of his cousin and best buddy Dennis. The story is structured around a wake held for Billy after he had basically drunk himself to death, made up of the recollections of the folks present, a bit of their individual stories. Oops.Īlice McDermott - image from Johns Hopkins University Later in life, Billy goes to Ireland, intending to visit her grave, and finds her alive and feeling guilty. His cousin Dennis knew the truth and lied to Billy, telling him she had died. She returned to the old country and he expected her to come back when he sent for her. Charming Billy tells of a New York Mic who, as a young man, had a great passion for an Irish lass. In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many millions with just one more.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott