Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘October, 2007’

Alice McDermott – Charming Billy

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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.  

Jane Urquhart – The Underpainter

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For the past year I have belonged to a book group here in Switzerland. This is by far the best book group I have ever had the luck to join. We’re an international group of women who meet once a month in one of the region’s wine caveaus – a beautiful smoky cellar filled with wine casks and gnarled old vines in a village that dates to Roman times. We do a tasting and talk literature for a few hours – it is an evening I look forward to all month and I am never disappointed. Last month we discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and this month David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is on the schedule – I cannot wait.

Sometime last year we read Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass which was my introduction to this Canadian writer. On the whole we were a divided group. Some of us loved the book and others a bit less. I was in the second camp. Something about the novel put me off. It is a beautifully written story and deals with emotional distance and artistic expression in an intriguing way – which might have been the problem. Like my more recent experience with Don Delillo’s Falling Man, when a character keeps his or her distance from me, I tend to respond a lot less as well. While reading it, I kept telling myself that I should love it but something held me back. However, Urquhart’s stunning and skillful writing told me that I had found an author I might like to try again.

When I saw another Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter, on one of the awards lists for the Book Awards Reading Challenge I added her to my list and I am so glad that I did. What was even more interesting about this read was that although the story is extremely different, the themes in The Underpainter are very similar to those in A Map of Glass – emotional distance and the artistic mediation of that same distance.

The story is narrated by an elderly painter named Austin and covers a large span of his life, from his childhood into his forties. I mentioned yesterday that this book reminds me of Les Ames Grises and this is mostly because the tone of the narrator is so similar – such sorrow and regret, and such a need to account for his life. Austin circles in and out of his own story and the story of one of his friends – George. The two stories are, of course, linked far more deeply than is initially expected. And the way Urquhart moves us through these men’s lives is so adept, each new experience echoing another.

Writing a novel about a completely unlikable character who needs the reader’s sympathy for the story to work is difficult and Austin was one of the most difficult characters to get on with I have ever read. He made me angry before I managed to feel sorry for him and it took me a long time to forgive him but this serves the story’s purpose in a clever way. So all I can do now is admire how Urquhart pulled it off.

The Underpainter is essentially a love story. But that completely reduces all that is actually contained in its pages – yes, it is about Austin and Sara, his artistic muse, it is also about George and Vivian and later Augusta (one of the book’s most interesting characters), but it is also about the trauma of WWI, about choosing whether to observe life or experience it, and it is most definitely about artistic passion and how different individuals manifest and serve that passion.

Alice McDermott – At Weddings and Wakes

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Alice McDermott’s At Wedding and Wakes is subtle, very subtle. And quiet. With a healthy dose of nostalgia and a certain reverence for the bewildering emotions of childhood. The story belongs to almost every member of the Irish-Catholic Dailey Family – a grandmother, four sisters (Agnes, Veronica, May and Lucy), May’s fiancé, Lucy’s husband and their three children. Most of the story comes filtered through the collective eyes of these three children, although McDermott jumps point of view all the time, a way to give life to each and every character, no matter how small.

Veronica, for example, begins as a missing element, the sister living in the shadows when the children visit their grandmother. At first it seems that McDermott is content to let her stay that way – separate, faceless, silent. Until suddenly in the middle of the book her own story stands up and says, Pay Attention. It is a beautiful moment and resonates through the rest of the book every time Veronica silently steps across the page.

There isn’t anything resembling a plot in this novel, no real forward action, no single story to latch onto – but this isn’t a drawback. This book is for careful, quiet reading. Paying attention to the prose is reward enough. In many ways At Weddings and Wakes reads like a series of vignettes. Although series isn’t the right word because the different stories don’t move in a straight line, instead they loosely circle the death of May – an event that is never realized in the book but whose repercussions are hinted at and projected through glimpses of May’s final days.

One of the more interesting things that McDermott does in this novel is take liberties with the timeline in ways that should be unsettling but which never actually disturb the surface of the story. She has a way of jumping quickly forward from a particular moment and creating a memory out of something actually happening. It’s like she explodes that very moment in time, filling it with longer-term emotions and transforming it into something more complex and complicated than it could ever be on its own. That she does this so seamlessly is a fantastic testament to her skill as our narrator.

So what is At Weddings and Wakes about? On one level it’s about the mysteries of family dynamic – how we work against each other, hurt each other and yet still manage to cultivate love and duty in that difficult environment. On another, it’s about falling in love – a boy with a vocation, an older couple with the idea of happiness, a young girl with the tragic story of her aunt’s late marriage and early death. And on even another, it’s about collective story telling – the narratives and threads of existence that we pull and weave together to create who we are and how we want to remember our life.

At Weddings and Wakes was published in 1992. It is Alice McDermott’s third novel.

Next in line for my Reading the Author Challenge is McDermott’s Charming Billy which won the National Book Award in 1998.

Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex

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Is gender genetically or socially determined? This is the question that lies behind Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. Enter Calliope – the lucky girl who gets to be a muse for her adult male self. Calliope is raised as a girl but discovers at the age of fourteen that genetically, and almost physically, she is actually male.  

Middlesex is often presented as a single story – Calliope’s. In fact, the novel doesn’t really belong to Calliope at all, it is more about how the entire Stefanides family and their various experiences resulted in Calliope. And so the novel actually begins in their ancestral village of Smyrna, a village the Stefanides were forced to leave during the Great Fire of 1922, and moves forward through two further generations as the family adjusts to immigrant life in Detroit.  

Eugenides uses incest and its genetic consequences as an explanation for Calliope’s disorder and so he sets it up early. In Smyrna, we meet Desdemona and her brother Lefty – who soon becomes her husband Lefty. The problem of inbreeding is continued, in a lesser degree, in the subsequent generation when Desdemona and Lefty’s son Milton marries his second cousin. The adult Cal is our narrator through all of this and his tone is an intriguing one – part admirative, part sympathetic, part accusative. He has a vested interest in getting the details of his family history recorded correctly because they are what made him who and what he is.  

The trick to enjoying this novel is perhaps understanding its humor. Cal’s hermaphroditic situation is tragic but it is so tragic it is also comic. And the entire family history rides along the crest of that paradox. Once Lefty and Desdemona finally arrive in Detroit, their immigrant experience turns into a kind of farcical sitcom: Lefty gets work as a rumrunner, they move in with their married (but devoutly lesbian) cousin, they open a juke joint that eventually becomes an old-fashioned diner, Desdemona gets work in a wacky mosque. But beneath that are all the banal tragedies of life: racism, poverty, and perhaps the most poignant tragedy of all, despite their unusual romantic beginnings Lefty and Desdemona struggle with the sad reality of a fading love affair. The torch is passed to the next generation – enter Milton and Tessie and their children. 

Finally, we meet Calliope. Calliope’s childhood more closely examines the novel’s preoccupying question about gender determinism. She is a beautiful child who grows tall and slender, perfectly girlie and bad at sports to boot. Socially, she is unequivocally a girl. But puberty acts as the catalyst for all of Calliope’s gender identity issues – she falls in love with another girl at her school which leads toward her first confusing sexual experiences, the eventual discovery of her genetic mutation and the journey of self-realization that ensues. 

Middlesex is a multi-storied saga. The novel begins with such incredible steam, charging forward unapologetically through Lefty and Desdemona’s affair and what happens to this unusual couple in America. But it somehow loses pressure as we get closer to Calliope. Perhaps because it is the adult Cal telling the story – without meaning to he answers almost all our questions about his life and what it has done to him before we get a chance to ask them. There is no doubt, however, that Middlesex is an interesting and captivating read. The book is extremely well-written and contains a breathtaking amount of history. If for nothing else, the sheer creativity in Eugenides’ careful prose makes this a book worth trying.