Charming Billy (1998) by Alice McDermott

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Charming Billy (1998) 

by Alice McDermott

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 36/105

The Bronx: 5/7*

* mis-mapped- should be in Queens....

   Charming Billy won the National Book Award in 1998.   Unclear why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has placed it in the Bronx instead of Queens.  To quote the first line of the New York Times review, "The Irish Catholic world Alice McDermott writes about in her magical new novel, ''Charming Billy,'' is located in Queens, not Dublin."   McDermott is one of those writers "celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-century American life" who I have studiously avoided for my entire life.  Indeed, the 1,001 Novels project I've undertaken is specifically an attempt to rectify this purposeful omission. That means I'm trying to keep a positive and optimistic attitude about reading hundreds of books about alcoholic ethnic-white Americans and sad teenage girls trying to get out of their bedrooms.

  At least Charming Billy is an award winner, another category I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I go through this list.  Additionally, Charming Billy is neither a work of detective fiction nor a YA title, so that also made the reading experience tolerable.  Finally, there is no denying that Charming Billy is chock filled with literary technique- using a kaleidoscopic approach that takes the reader backwards and forwards in time and space (from Queens to Long Island and back, at least.)    The Billy of the title is a recently deceased alcoholic, and the book explores his lifelong "great disappointment"-  being abandoned by an Irish girl-woman who promises to return from a visit home to marry him and subsequently throws him over for a local lad- and the impact it may or may not have had on his lifetime of alcoholism. 

   McDermott and her characters are not naive dummies- the narrator- who I think is a younger sister of the extended clan- early on questions the premise that a lifetime of alcoholism  could possibly be triggered by a single romantic disappointment.   But here we are, three hundred pages about the impact of said romantic disappointment.   Also, this is another book on the 1,001 Novels list where the dysfunction of a single family member ends up defining the life of all the other family members.   There are a lot of those books on this list.