CHARMING ALICE

...Only in the margins of the story do we get the skimpiest hints at her own life: a college graduate, married, living in Seattle with her children and husband...

...Set in 1983, Charming Billy focuses on three days following the funeral of Billy Lynch, WWII veteran, longtime employee of Con Edison, and lifelong resident of IrishCatholic New York (Queens, to be exact...

...There's something almost willful in the baroque extravagance of McDermott's style...

...But there's a reason for the elusive, anonymous quality of McDermott's narrators...

...His goodness of heart gets soaked up by friends and relatives whose hurting he does for them: he loves and loses...

...McDermott takes us to Long Island in the summer of 1945, where Billy meets and courts a young Irish nanny named Eva...

...Again, McDermott isn't content merely to describe a texture of consciousness...

...It is a rousing, tender rendition of that stock Irish figure, the poetic rogue in love with his sorrows...

...There's a fine line between the exquisite and the laborious, and such writing risks becoming a parody of lyricism...

...She used awkward plot moves to steer the novel toward what she really wanted to write about, namely, not her heroine's present but her past--a child's perception of the physical world and the stubborn mysteries of adulthood...

...cDermott's new novel, Charming Billy, is her most challenging to date--incorrigibly digressive, brash with time, intricately layered and crammed full of life...

...Behind his sorrow lies a tale of deception and lost love...

...and "To the younger girl it seemed that...

...characters with names like Mickey Quinn or Bridle "from the old neighborhood" (famous for her pound cake, made with a full pound of butter...

...It's as if the welter of names and stories--or rather our resistance to it--reveals our own attenuated capacity for family life...

...The coffee table with its doily, plastic flowers, and dish of sugared almonds...

...Love that's like a spiritual life, like pure faith....'), the novel was a classic case of a writer fighting her own strengths...

...Where do these sketches begin or end-with the orange's heft and shine, the concentrated weight of its earthly shape, or with the invisible likeness left behind in empty air, the orange become pure possibility...

...the family photographs...

...The novel studies an Irish-Catholic family in New Rand Richards Cooper is a frequent Commonweal contributor...

...But McDermott frames Billy's life story in ironies, stinting neither the cost nor the complexity of his romanticism...

...So too with the protusion of characters and their stories...

...where children are taught the lives of the saints by nuns with names like Sister Illuminata...

...everything draped and dim and airless, and from the next room the muffled sound of someone sobbing: it is an achingly detailed tableau of lace-curtain Irish despair...

...His most recent book, a collection of short stories, is Big as Life (Dial...

...she wants to create it, taking the density of Irish Catholic working-class family life and pressing it into the very molecules of the novel...

...If That Night discovered its author's preoccupations-- memory and the world of the child, the character of community, the power of desire, the evanescence and permanence of time, the ironies of fate---At Weddings and Wakes (1992) pushed them further...

...Still, those who dismiss Billy's suffering as the "genetic di~ ease" of alcoholism--there's an Uncle Ted, an evangelical AA member---come off as pinched and zealous proponents of our era's mistaken urge to collapse tragedy into (mere) pathology: a reductively pragmatic approach, McDermott clearly believes, to the mysteries of human existence...

...Like Gatsby, Billy conflates romance with poetry...

...To shrug off the burdens of group identity is also to shrug off ferocious attachments...

...A Bigamist's Daughter was ostensibly a smart '80s novel about a woman finding her strength...

...At times she's content simply to sit her characters around a table and quote speaker after speaker, or to compress their talk into a group monologue of page-spanning paragraphs that reads like an unedited transcript...

...Lives of our own, we said...

...Charming Billy is told by the daughter of Billy's cousin Dennis, but through The Orange (from ~he prison drawings of Breyten Bretenbach) An orange, four times, in grey pencil: whole, partly peeled, almost entirely eaten, gone...

...Elsewhere, her narrator steps forward with pronouncements that have a Jane Austen-like ring: "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...

...She's a rather ghostly presence, never named, often present in the room but listening far more than talking...

...Yes, things are gained: mobility, a change of scenery, freedom--including sexual freedom--education and professional status, and so on...

...York, circa 1960, through the eyes of two girls and a boy brought on weekly visits from their home on Long Island to their grandmother's apartment in Brooklyn, where through endless afternoons the children's mother and three aunts pour out decades of pent-up disappointments, hopes, and recriminations...

...Third-generation Irish-Americans situated at the end of a progression that goes urban New York, suburban Long Island, Somewhere Else, they stand looking back through the one-way window of assimilation at the lives their parents and grandparents lived...

...You may find yourself flipping back to check which Daniel Lynch this is (there are two) or whose Uncle Jim worked at Edison back in '37...

...The mildly deprecating irony McDermott reserves for what might be called post-Irish life suggests ambivalence about the trade-offs that come with breaking free of one's roots...

...It was bad in the way some clothing is bad: it just didn't fit...

...McDermott's subsequent career has been a matter of setting this trapped book free...

...Under the cover of a realist's reverence for descriptive detail and a romance writer's duty to affairs of the heart, McDermott conducts surprising experiments in form and voice...

...Charming Billy bids farewell both to Billy and to his entire way of life, its nameless narrator sent back to inspect a world where everyone owned a piece of you from one where identity rests on the still more perilous ground of self-discovery...

...Through the reminiscences of family and friends we meet an incurable romantic who drank himself to death at sixty: a Billy who charms older ladies in restaurants...

...CHARMING ALICE A unique voice in American fiction Rand Richards Cooper ne of the pleasures of going back to a talented writer's early work is finding the promising failure, the intriguingly bad book...

...It's as if she feels her previous books haven't gone far enough, that this time she's determined not merely to write about loss, but to take it down into the basic structures of the novel itself, fashioning a syntax of melancholy, a prose that gasps with sadness and doubles back on itself like the tangled contingencies of fate...

...Self-consciousness more the vogue...

...or wondering how you got onto the story of Billy's cousin's mother's Great-Aunty Eileen...

...Though the fate of one of the aunts figures as a recurring fugue theme, the novel is less plotted than painted...

...to a vanishing corner of Irish Catholicism...

...But much gets lost...

...Hence the ghostly narrators...

...At Weddings and Wakes took the lyrical sadness of That Night and joined it to something like ethnography...

...The story is told, retrospectively, by a nameless narrator who watched the rumble as a ten-year-old, and whose own adult identity is subordinated to her role as witness to the past--in effect, a stand-in omniscient narrator, telling the story and its ramifications from all angles...

...Written in a lovely prose that quivers at the brink of sentimentality--this is a writer who can make even a door, "easing itself closed with what soundCommonweal | 0 March27, 1998 ed like three short sorrowful expirations of breath," seem wistf u l - i t is a nostalgic and immaculately detailed valedictory...

...Through a go-between Dennis uncovers the banal truth (Eva has married another man and used the $500 to open a ga s station), but tells Billy instead she died of pneumonia...

...Which brings us, finally, to the narrator...

...calls his cousin and best friend, Dennis, in the middle of the night to rail drunkenly against death and the passing of all things...

...The close focus on one event enabled McDermott to range widely through time, and in and out of the various characters as well, creating the novel's blend of tight control with lyrical expansiveness, and giving vent to a sensibility at once rapturous and haunted...

...Robert Cording much of the novel you'd hardly notice it...

...Indeed, an odd disjunction between the extravagant detail of her descriptive writing and an unwillingness to individuate the point-of-view character has figured increasingly as a hallmark of McDermott's style...

...Then there's the fact that Billy's tragedy is founded on a lie...

...Burdened with backstory, plot contrivances, and stilted dialogue ("Some love goes even beyond the lover himself...

...but there's also a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald in this novel--Billy an Irish workingman's Gatsby, Eva his Daisy, and Ireland itself, perhaps, the green light over the water...

...That Night (1987), a sparkling, swooning evocation of a lost era, related the events of a summer evening in a 1960s Long Island suburb, when a gang of hot-rodding town toughs, attempting to steal away their leader's girlfriend, does battle with the fathers of the neighborhood...

...Back in Ireland, she agrees to marry him, accepts the money he saves to send for her passage--and then is heard from no more...

...This too is an extension of an impulse already evident in That Night...

...First there are the ravages of alcohol and its punishing toll on the body: the downside of poetry is, literally, morbidity...

...kissing Eva on the beach in 1945 he feels, McDermott writes, "a desire for life itself to be as sweet as certain words could make it seem...

...And for whose benefit...

...he keeps the faith...

...men who stop after work at Quinlan's for a quick drink before Friday Mass and who call their wives "Mama...

...The Christian echo of a redemptive, sacrificial quality to Billy's passion could be heavy-handed...

...And it is a life McDermott's point-of-view characters have left behind...

...Lives of our own, we said...

...For better and for worse, this is the life of ethnic and religious community--loud, close-knit, restrictive...

...The grand struggle to wrest one's self from the group delivers her protagonists to this deeply American paradox: that getting a life of your own brings a diminished sense of who you are...

...Self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue...

...Reading Charming Billy one feels at times something like the strangeness, the scratchy bewilderment, of things perceived across a cultural divide...

...The impulsive lie inaugurates Billy's decades of grieving devotion to her memow--he eventually marries, but stays true in his heart to Eva--and places in the novel's foreground the proposition that a life of deluded passion is better than one of clear-eyed disillusion...

...But McDermott guards against bathos by making those mourners who explicitly construe Billy as a Christ figure themselves seem heavy-handed...

...An elegiac impulse plays freely with her sentences, lending a curious, huffing quality: 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...

...apartment living rooms where the brocade sofa with its plastic slipcovers stands beneath a framed copy of the Irish Blessing as a new wddow sobs in grief, and the Monsignor, stopping to offer solace, is welcomed with awe and deference, like a movie star...

...harming Billy is a stealthily ambitious work of ficC tion...

...It is a crowded picture, replete with emblems of a no-frills urban Irish Catholicism: a funeral party over roast beef and boiled potatoes...

...Alice McDermott's first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter (1982), told the story of a Manhattan vanity press editor romantically involved with one of her luckless writers...

...Charming Bilhj seems wildly discursive, chronicling not mereCommonweal | | March 27, 1998 ly the principal players in Billy's life, but much of the large supporting cast as well...

...At Weddings and Wakes is the only novel I can think of told from a third-person-plural point of view, a narrative built on "The children saw...

...and McDermott's novels express doubt about whether, as ties attenuate and the old neighborhood sinks further into the past, anything as vivid and nourishing will take their place...

...In Charming Billy the narrator's few comments about herself make clear who she is: "I married Matt and we headed off to Seattle...

...Reading At Weddings and Wakes is a bit like being carried to a window on the shoulders of anonymous porters...

...A history of changed perspectives in grey pencil, his mind drawing strength and satisfaction from diminishments...

...Yet the children's individual identities are strangely blurred...

...Critics have likened McDermott to Joyce...

...It would be easy enough to toss the crutch aside and let an omniscient narrator take the slow drift back through the decades of Billy's life...

...Readers of McDermott's last two books, recognizing yet another version of the trademark stealth narrator, may wonder, why not simply dispense with her altogether...

...cahns a woman's baby by murmuring Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens...

...How lonely they all seemed to me that night, my father's family and friends, lonely souls every, one of them, despite husbands and children and cousins and friends, all their hopes, in the end, their pairings and procreation and their keeping in touch, keeping track, futile in the end, failing in the end to keep them from seeing that nothing they felt, in the end, has made any difference...

...we barely learn their names, and other than a few parenthetical asides which sweep us decades ahead, we get no glimpse of their subsequent, adult lives and selves...

...writes notes on napkins to send to the priest...

...Bent on a single point-of-view protagonist, McDermott restrained a powerful storytelling impulse and ended up making her characters speak her own themes...

...Commonweal | 2 March 27, 1998...

...Who are all these people...

...Who is this person looking back with such regret and longing...

...Is that a breviary in Billy's jacket pocket, or a flask...

...Inside is a world where wedding-party bands play "Galway Bay" as men tell stories of Gentleman Jimmy Walker or a voice calls out "Sweet Jesus, don't mention Parnell...

...Why bother to bring the narrator in as an actual character if you're not going to fill her out...

...And yet how difficult, clearly, the parting-each section sticky with life, the orange's inconceivable loss finally attained...

...But trapped inside it was very different book, less breezy and ironic, more lyrical and backward-looking, and far less narratively conventional...