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Review by Leah Odze Epstein
On the afternoon of Billy Lynch's funeral, his family and friends gather at a Bronx bar and grill to make sense of his life. Why did this charismatic man who "everyone loved" drink himself to death? Was he dissatisfied with his marriage to the plain-looking but steadfast Maeve? If his first love had never died and they had gotten married, would he have been saved? Or was Billy's pathetic outcome fated from the start? Eavesdropping on all this is Alice McDermott's narrator, the intensely insightful daughter of Billy's cousin and best friend, Dennis.
In the hands of a lesser writer, we might find ourselves losing interest in a dead man's unremarkable past, but under the spell of McDermott's all-encompassing eye, "Charming Billy" becomes not just an illumination of Billy's life but of all the intersecting lives in his tight-knit Irish American community.
Deftly capturing, in beautifully rhythmic sentences, the ebb and flow of conversation at the post-funeral meal, McDermott involves readers in the debates regarding Billy's life. His sister takes the pragmatic view that "Alcoholism isn't a decision, it's a disease, and Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve, whether he'd had kids or not. . . . Every alcoholic's life is pretty much the same." Billy's bachelor drinking buddy Dan Lynch holds a more romantic view: "I just don't think it credits a man's life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that's what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed . . . But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate."
So why did Billy's life turn out so miserably? As the narrator's father fleshes out the speculations made at the 1983 funeral by telling her what really happened after Billy met the Irish girl in 1946, most readers will find themselves hooked. Just as the narrator constantly asks questions as she tries to understand not only Billy's life but her father's and her own, so too does the reader see how slippery "truth" is. As the events of Billy's life are laid bare, his mystery only deepens.
The author of the much-praised "At Weddings and Wakes," "The Bigamist's Daughter" and "That Night" has written a profound meditation on the power of storytelling. Like any great fiction writer, McDermott knows that mystery is precisely what keeps us intrigued. Just as Billy was seduced by the bar -- "A world where love . . . could be spoken of by a hand on the shoulder, a fresh drink placed on the bar, Good to see you, through welling tears, real ones now, Ah, Billy, it's always good to see you. Dark, sparkling, sprinkled with moments when the sound and smell and sight of the place . . . transported him, however briefly, to a summer night long ago when he was young and life was all promise . . ." -- so readers are only too happy to submit to the illusions that fiction creates: illusions that capture life more vividly than the so-called "facts" ever can.
Leah Odze Epstein lives and writes in New York City.
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