P0ETRY: The Orange
Cording, Robert
ly the principal players in Billy's life, but much of the large supporting cast as well. You may find yourself flipping back to check which Daniel Lynch this is (there are two) or whose Uncle Jim...
...Robert Cording much of the novel you'd hardly notice it...
...Which brings us, finally, to the narrator...
...And it is a life McDermott's point-of-view characters have left behind...
...In Charming Billy the narrator's few comments about herself make clear who she is: "I married Matt and we headed off to Seattle...
...or wondering how you got onto the story of Billy's cousin's mother's Great-Aunty Eileen...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue...
...Lives of our own, we said...
...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...
...She's a rather ghostly presence, never named, often present in the room but listening far more than talking...
...Hence the ghostly narrators...
...But there's a reason for the elusive, anonymous quality of McDermott's narrators...
...Why bother to bring the narrator in as an actual character if you're not going to fill her out...
...Again, McDermott isn't content merely to describe a texture of consciousness...
...A history of changed perspectives in grey pencil, his mind drawing strength and satisfaction from diminishments...
...Lives of our own, we said...
...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...
...Yes, things are gained: mobility, a change of scenery, freedom--including sexual freedom--education and professional status, and so on...
...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...
...men who stop after work at Quinlan's for a quick drink before Friday Mass and who call their wives "Mama...
...Self-consciousness more the vogue...
...Commonweal | 2 March 27, 1998...
...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...
...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...
...But much gets lost...
...For better and for worse, this is the life of ethnic and religious community--loud, close-knit, restrictive...
...To shrug off the burdens of group identity is also to shrug off ferocious attachments...
...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...
...Reading Charming Billy one feels at times something like the strangeness, the scratchy bewilderment, of things perceived across a cultural divide...
...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...
...It is a crowded picture, replete with emblems of a no-frills urban Irish Catholicism: a funeral party over roast beef and boiled potatoes...
...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...
...Who is this person looking back with such regret and longing...
...characters with names like Mickey Quinn or Bridle "from the old neighborhood" (famous for her pound cake, made with a full pound of butter...
...And yet how difficult, clearly, the parting-each section sticky with life, the orange's inconceivable loss finally attained...
...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...
...Who are all these people...
...It's as if the welter of names and stories--or rather our resistance to it--reveals our own attenuated capacity for family life...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 6
