Michelle Bailat-Jones

Finished up my 4th Reading the Author Challenge book last night – Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. McDermott came away with the National Book Award in 1998 for this quiet novel and it is considered one of her finest.  

My notes from the first time I read Charming Billy, sometime back in 2004, mention that I found the perspective jarring because while it was first person it was also omniscient. Having had more experience with her work now, I have come to appreciate McDermott’s ability to meld the two perspectives and think that it brings a richness, or maybe a better word for it is layering, to her stories. The narrator sweeps in and out of several story threads at once, reserving different levels of authority for each one. In many ways, the combination of threads work to reveal a larger narrative about who the narrator actually is – but this is done so slyly, so covertly, that it is only at the end you realize what all the storytelling has really been about. 

The novel begins with Billy Lynch’s death (the horrible and messy death of an alcoholic) and the necessary assembling of friends and family to grieve and remember him. They recreate the stories of Billy’s life, focusing on a part of his history that made him famous, the story of his falling in love with an Irish girl visiting in New York, of his asking her to marry him, then sending her the money so she could come back to him and finally, of his getting the news that she has died. This tragedy becomes the epicenter of the earthquake that Billy’s life will turn out to be – nights of drunken grieving, a childless marriage to a woman that everyone suspects knew she was second best, strained friendships and endless health problems.  

But the trick of the story is that the girl, Eva, never died. I am not giving anything away with this information – the narrator and her father Dennis (Billy’s cousin, but more like a best friend) have known the truth of Eva’s disappearance all along. In fact, the lie of her death was created by Dennis himself, a moment of panic when he realized he couldn’t tell love-struck Billy that Eva had taken his money and married another man in Ireland. 

What comes out of this scenario is a frank examination of the idea of fated experience, a look at how our memories are constructed around significant events that, if we have the courage to consider it, might not be that significant in the end. Dennis’ lie is wrapped up in his own desire for fairytale, Billy’s alcoholism is given a convenient excuse, our longing for ideal love is provided safe shelter. She writes: 

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.  

And just a few lines later: 

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 million with just one more. 

Charming Billy is about so much more than Billy’s story. It is about the complexity and complicity of family life and marriage, a subject that McDermott brings to all of her work with a great deal of finesse. It is also about all the ways you can lose a loved one and how that loss may dissolve any previously firm foundations on which to base belief or hope. And in a subtle way, it is very much about understanding the balance of acceptance and resignation versus cherishing necessary ideals.  

I have two more McDermotts to go to finish up the challenge but I will take a small break and not start the next one until later in November. The next two are completely new to me and I’d like to let these last four fade a bit more before I start again.  

There is a lot of important and provocative fiction out there; in the last two years alone there have been numerous BIG books. What I mean by that are the books that openly tackle huge questions about morality or the future, about issues relating to theology, philosophy, good and evil. While I do love fiction that takes on those kinds of challenges, I also have an immense respect for the writer that takes a quieter story – a tale of love and madness, of ordinary heartbreak and modest triumph – and writes it honestly and beautifully.  

The actual story behind Alice McDermott’s novel That Night is nothing extraordinary – teenage love, life lessons learned early…but the careful way McDermott works this simple narrative manages to create a startlingly rich world peopled by a sympathetic cast of characters with a lot to say about life. The entire novel centers on a single event in the life of the narrator – a summer evening of her youth when a street fight broke out between some teenage kids and the neighborhood fathers.  

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad – the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes – startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all. 

The voice McDermott sets up here is just wonderful. The narrator looks back on the event with a keen nostalgia and a careful eye on everyone involved. And she continues to move in and around the event, telling how it came about and how it was resolved, with this same unique narrative access. In this way, she creates a microcosm of desires and disappointments for her entire neighborhood from the shared history of this event – an ingenious trick that adds a subtle weight to the entire story and infuses even the smallest action with deeper meaning.  

But now as she watched her cousin’s husband turning casually and only a little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

And so it happens that wedged inside the simple story of a teenage romance gone awry is a cautious exploration of love and how it works, how it comes into being and in what shape, how important it can seem, and how sometimes it must be given up in the process of growing up.  

That Night is McDermott’s second novel, published in 1987 and it went on to become a finalist for The Pulitzer, the Pen/Faulkner and the National Book Award.

Reading an author’s first novel is always an interesting experience. Especially because in most cases I’ve already read a later work so my basis for evaluation seems a little unfair. That’s not to say that all first novels come out lacking in comparison to an author’s later works (in fact, sometimes it’s the reverse) but sometimes it is clear that the writer is still working through the questions of style or thematic project when the first novel is published. And really this makes sense because writing careers develop over a long time, have ups and downs, big triumphs along with mediocre successes, just like any other profession. Still, I enjoy reading first novels because I can get the sense I’m experiencing a real time development of the writer’s skills and confidence. 

Such it was with Alice McDermott’s A Bigamist’s Daughter. Now, I went into this reading with certain preconceptions about the kind of writer that McDermott is and so it was relatively fun to see how those presumptions held up. I’ve always considered McDermott the most non-flashy of American novelists – someone who writes subtly and tactfully about sex, who tackles domestic (I’m using this word in a positive way) and intimate themes about family and relationships with great insight. Well, to my surprise, The Bigamist’s Daughter is big on fairly explicit sex and it deals with what I would consider the rather provocative subject of vanity publishing. I say provocative because I think it was really ballsy of her to write so scornfully of vanity publishing in her first book. A daring or ingratiating literary feat. 

All that aside, McDermott’s fine touch is unmistakable in this early work. Here is the basic story: 25 year-old Elizabeth is an editor at a NYC vanity press. One afternoon a client comes in with a book about a bigamist. She goes through her usual schpiel, telling him how great it is, pretending she’s actually read it. The fact of the matter is, as long as he’s willing to pay, he’ll get his book. But Elizabeth and the writer end up in a sexual relationship and here is where the story takes a few surprising turns. As it turns out, Elizabeth‘s father kept another family and she’s living out the legacy of his duplicity – in her own romantic life and with her relationship with her mother.  

I nearly got the sense that there were two writers vying for territory in this book – one who wanted to write a chick-lit-esque satire on the life and amorous escapades of a young NYC editor and one who was really interested in exploring the painful territory of a parent’s influence on their children, the aftertaste of a strict religious upbringing as well as the pitfalls and victories of feminism. The first author was primarily concerned with creating a new kind of heroine, smart, tough and vulnerable all in one. The second author wanted to investigate the boundaries of fiction and how we self-narrate our successes and failures. Because of her skill, I think McDermott pulls off this combination but there were moments when I felt like I could see the seams.  

At least for me, the most satisfying part of reading McDermott will always be her writing. The startling little moments of intuition or exposure: 

She held herself before me rather delicately, as if her center were made of fragile glass. It made me feel childish, or fat, clumsy – a woman without a lover facing a woman with one. I glimpsed, for a moment, what Ward must have found so fascinating and tragic about her: that odd and delicate core, full of secrets. 

It occurs to her that every great realization given up, spoken, placed in another’s clumsy hands is, at heart, silly; every message from the grave a stale sermon or a slick song; every fiction, with all its attempts at sense and order, climax and resolution, words that mean something and change everything, laughable. Terribly laughable. Merely an excuse for fear, for laziness, for bad luck.  

Lovely, isn’t it? And her writing is filled with these keenly perceived moments.  

My next book will be That Night, published in 1987, five years after A Bigamist’s Daughter. I’ve already read That Night and loved it, so I’m really looking forward to this re-read.