My Favorite Books of the Past Year

I’ve decided to depart from my usual routine of reviewing a single book and instead talk about my favorite books over the past year. I make almost no attempt in my reading to stay current with what is being published. Thus, in 2016, I discovered Kent Haruf who had died just before I began reading him. I quickly read up everything he had written. My discoveries this year were Mary Lawson and William Boyd (though Boyd has been writing for decades and I had not read him at all until a friend from Austrailia recommended him to me. 

I will begin my list with all three of Mary Lawson’s wonderful books: Crow Lake, Over the Bridge,  and Road Ends. The reader who loaned me Crow Lake is still a bit miffed at me, because I loaned it out before getting around to returning it, and then forgot to whom I had loaned it. Lawson is a quiet writer, who makes manifest the extraordinary in ordinary lives. One reviewer gets directly to the heart of the matter. “Like her fellow Canadians Alice Munro and the late Carol Shields, Lawson is a master of the quiet moment made significant.” Just so and she belongs in that select company of Munro and Shields. Like Kent Haruf, she writes about a single small town and her characters overlap from one book to the next. I suggest you begin with Crow Lake and read all of her novels, though one can start with any one of them.

Next I will mention again a book I reviewed a short time ago, and one that charmed me so that I have already given away or loaned a half dozen copies, The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Based on a Russian fairy-tale, this is a book you will want to share with or read to your children. I should mention however that the content is complex and sometimes troubling. I was reminded of this when one of my reader friends read it to her six-year-old, and while she is glad she did, and the young boy loved the book, it did provoke very serious discussions about death, our relationship with the animal kingdom and the nature of human love. I rarely read fantasy fiction, but this is a book I am so glad I happened on to.

Next, let me talk briefly about William Boyd whose imagination continues to astound me. I just yesterday finished the last of his books that I had not already read, Armadillo, and like The Blue Afternoon, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach and others, I was swept into the complicated  life of his main character. Many of his novels are either mysteries or war stories, and each is carefully researched, and yet one never knows what to expect when moving from one novel to the next. I would suggest starting with Any Human Heart since I believe it is the most autobiographical of his many novels written over the past two or three decades. Again, one can start anywhere in his twenty some novels.

Although I am not attempting to rank these in any particular order, the next on my list is Amor Towel’s novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, a thoroughly researched book about the early days in Russia after the revolution. I would also recommend Towel’s The Rules of Civility, about as different from Gentleman in Moscow as could be. Incidentally, this latter book has a woman as its main narrator, and several of my reader friends (including myself) thought as we were reading that certainly the author must be a woman.

Next on my list is yet another male author which surprises me some, since I have been reading and reviewing mostly women writers for the last ten or twenty years. The book is Brooklyn, and the author is Colm Toibin. This is the story of an Irish girl who comes to this country with little money and very little training. It is in many ways a simple story of a very courageous young woman. You may already know Toibin as the the author of The Master, a book based on the life of Henry James. 

Next on my list, and perhaps the best book of 2017, is Manhattan Beach, by the superb author Jennifer Egan (author of A Visit From the Goon Squad). This is an historical novel that focuses on the role women played in shipyards and factories during World War II. It shows again that Egan is in the very front ranks of living authors.

Although I don’t read (or review) many mysteries or thrillers, I was very impressed with Tara French’s The Trespasser. This is again about thee Murder Squad in Dublin, and Detective Antoinette Conway is as tough as they come. While it is a serious mystery, it is also often very funny, and describes well the difficulties of being a woman cop surrounded by men who want to see women fail. 

Just two more, and I will stop for now, although I have read so many excellent books in the last year. Alice McDermott published another fine novel (all of her work is extraordinary); this last one is titled The Ninth Hour and I reviewed it just last month. I see her as an extremely perceptive feminist author, and enjoy reading of her tempestuous relationship with Catholicism.

Finally, if you have not read Alice Munro, whom I consider the finest fiction writer alive today, I would recommend to you a new collection of stories she, herself, put together selected from her many previously published short-story collections. Its title is Lying Under the Apple Tree, and although it contains no new stories, it was a pleasure to revisit some of her tales and especially ones that she selected, and would serve as a fine introduction to her work. 

Someone by Alice Mcdermott

Ever since being stunned by the quiet elegance of Alice Munro’s writing, I have greatly admired what I call quiet writers—quiet in the sense that there is very little overt drama in their stories, no rich-famous people or earth-shattering events. Instead, the focus is on ordinary people who, when looked at carefully and with compassion, have quite extraordinary inner lives.  

In recent years Munro has been joined (or I have joined her) with other writers who write about ordinary people who become quite extraordinary when seen through the lens of a great story-teller. Elizabeth Strout is one such writer, and Alice McDermott another. Today I’m going to talk about McDermott’s newest novel, Someone. She could as well have titled it Anyone since she is so intent on describing the life of a woman others see as plain and quite uninteresting. 

Like all of McDermott’s novels, this is a story of Irish-American families living in east coast cities. We meet seven year old Marie, the lead character in this novel, sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn observing carefully, as she always does, the bustle of life going on around her. Describing herself, Marie says, “At seven, I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eye, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon.” From this beginning, the short novel hopscotches between descriptions of her early life as an awkward child to her old age senility, the agonizing birth of her first child, the early death of her much loved father, her loyal and devoted brother’s brief stint as a priest and the constancy of his love for Marie throughout their lives. The actual chronology of her life much less important than the stitched together frames McDermott describes for us. 

In her first foray into romance, Marie meets a man who breaks off with her as soon as he finds a woman more attractive and with better economic prospects. He says he is doing it to give his future children the best chance he can, “It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.” Marie is not really surprised by his defection, but it is devastating nonetheless.  

I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.

As their Brooklyn neighborhood decays and most who can flee to the suburbs, Marie remains to care for her mother who fears a move, and finally fears even to leave her apartment in their battered brownstone. She and her brother lean on one another as they care for their widowed mother, and the quiet love they share is touchingly described, though always understated. If there is a love-angle in this novel, it is the relationship between brother and sister.

Marie is all in all a dutiful child, her teenage rebellion mild compared to most; it takes the form of refusing her mother’s attempts to teach her how to cook. “Well, I don’t want to learn.” I said. “Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls; a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all.” 

McDermott has an incredible talent with words, moving her readers quickly from the mundane (a sight or smell) to a rich memory and a complex life. Alice Munro is asked by a journalist why she writes stories; she replies that she wants to move people—that she wants her readers to be different people after finishing one of her stories. I am certainly moved my McDermott’s stories, and I would add that I feel I am a different person after reading one of her novels. Events in this novel (and in all of her stories) are often sad, as true to life stories often are, but I have to say I feel uplifted by her stories. I feel that I have been changed for the better by having read her. 

Rather than attempting to further describe her writing, let me end with a quote. Marie and Gabe, her brother, decide to walk together after Marie’s hurtful rejection by her boyfriend, much as her father had taken long walks with her to assuage some childhood grief. 

The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal. I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief. 

At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott

I spent quite a lot of time last year reading (and reviewing) what I have come to call quiet novels. All are quite intentionally about ‘ordinary’ people, and contain very little dramatic plot. No battles, no victories, no murders. Carol Shields and Alice Munro are masters of these quiet novels, and just this last year I (with my usual tardiness) discovered Alice McDermott and added her to the list of greats. I quickly read up everything of hers I could find. Today, I am going to talk about one of her early novels, published in ’92, entitled At Weddings and Wakes.

Most (though not all) great authors stick pretty closely to what they know, what they have lived, the people in the families and communities around them. For the most part, you can write convincingly only about what you know. Alice McDermott never even pretends to stray from the Irish-American-Catholic family-community she grew up in; indeed, she narrows even further to New York, Brooklyn, Long Island. Rarely is there much time that passes in the immediate tale—a wedding, a wake, a few days or months in the lives of a few closely connected people. But, of course, word-weaver that McDermott is, she manages to ripple back, and back, wider and wider as well as out into the wider world. The story of the wake or the wedding is the story of a life, of many lives.

The narration of this book is incredibly clever. We are told the story through the eyes of three children, two girls and a boy, but we are never really told which of the three is the center-vision, exactly who is telling the story. It might seem a too-clever device in some writers, but it seems natural, even inevitable as McDermott spins out this story. Except for “their father,” (as he is almost always referred to), and an older suitor of one of the aunts, this is a story about a family of women. Most of these women live together in a large New York flat. The matriarch, Momma, is actually an aunt to the other women who live there, but an aunt who ‘rescued’ them when their own mother died in childbirth (the child, Veronica, surviving). And who subsequently married their father, giving birth herself to one more child, a boy. The father, himself, dies soon after, suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving the women to care for themselves and for their new baby brother. It seems only natural to these children that the world is peopled mainly with women.

But, of course, it takes us a whole book to discover these things. McDermott writes with intense detail, unhurried description of a single event, and it is only in the close phenomenological description of (a perhaps) mundane experience that the strands of the story introduce themselves, only eventually to be woven into a whole. I find this way of writing so tantalizing, so engrossing. I won’t say much more about this now, but if you read her, you will quickly see what I am at getting regarding her attention to detail.

While this novel is, in fact, many stories, the story of Aunt May gives the book its focal point, its coherence and flow. Aunt May became a nun early in her life, and left her habit behind fifteen years later not because she did not like the life, but because she liked it too much. She understood that what her orders demanded was abnegation, negation of self, losing herself in the love of God. But she loved her life, loved the earth. Like Sisyphus, she chose earthly life to the promises of immortal glory. She loves the order of the life, loves the faces of the children she teaches, but understands her very love-of-life to be vanity.

Six years ago when she’d left the convent she had understood fully that it was not because she’d lost her vocation, only settled into it too perfectly. She understood it was because she had come to love too dearly the life she was leading, the early Masses and the simple meals and, in those years she taught, the small faces of her students. She’d loved her habit, the elegant long sleeves and the starched wimple, the skirts that brushed her heels and the great, extravagant pair of rosary beads that had swung from her belt. She’d loved her deep pockets and her small leather breviary and the way men on the street would touch their hats and call her Sister. She had entered the convent thinking she would give her life to God but found when she was there that her life grew more and more dear to her, that she had given it to no one but herself. She confessed this time and time again, and was finally advised to give up the teaching and request instead to train as a nurse, which she did. And then recognized in her patients, the old priests and nuns no less than the others, her own tenacious desire to live forever. She fasted and went without sleep and took on the household’s humblest tasks and still she knew she guarded her daily life, each of her own breaths and the very beat of her heart. Still she knew she no longer desired heaven, the sight of her dead parents or the face of the living God held no appeal, and even the torment this caused her, the hours of prayer and confession and counsel, seemed part of a rich and complex life; a life impossible to part with.

Since I am unashamedly an evangelical atheist, it always surprises me when I find someone who writes so well about lived-religious-lives, what gets called the phenomenology of religion. McDermott understands the bad things that Catholicism does to people, to women, to families, but she also understands the ways in which religious rituals bind together communities. In her books, Irish-Catholicism is more a backdrop than a set of beliefs; it is a kind of canvas on which lives get lived out. I find myself both surprised and oddly humbled by McDermott’s understanding of religious life.

Aunt May leaves the convent after fifteen years to return to Momma and her sisters, to live an ordered and somehow austere life. And then through some miracle of chance, she finds herself with a suitor. The mailman, whom she has seen and chatted with over much of a lifetime, suddenly sees her in a different light; he is transformed for her as well. And thus begins a sweet and simple and utterly believable courtship. Only once, again by happenstance, do the children catch a glimpse of Momma’s real reaction to her niece-daughter’s upcoming marriage, her sense of betrayal, even infidelity.

It takes McDermott fifteen pages to describe how “their mother,” the only one of the sisters who does not live with Momma, gathers together the three children for the walk, bus, subway trip into Brooklyn, where Momma and her sisters will gather first over tea, and only later over Manhattans. The children will be directed to play quietly, occupy themselves as they wait through interminable, imprisoned afternoons waiting for their father to rescue them. This event happens twice a week in every week of summer, save the last in July and the first in August when their father takes them all to Long Island, “… to the farthest, greenest reaches of the Island, to the very tip of the two long fingers that would seem to direct their eyes, as he himself would do each evening, to the wide expanse of the sea.”

Three children, three pairs of eyes, describing for us the lives of these women, and then backwards in time, outwards into a community. Such an extraordinary tale of such ordinary people.

After This by Alice McDermott

As we begin this new year, it seems like just the time to talk about great novels of 2006. Always a bit behind the times as a reader, Alice McDermott only came to my attention in this previous year, and I began by reading two of her earlier novels, Charming Billy and Child of My Heart. Both left deep impressions on me, so when Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air, named McDermott’s newest novel, After This, as one of her picks for novel of the year, I picked it up in spite of having to buy a hardbound copy. It was well worth it.

A reader and writer friend of mine (who also recommended this book to me) calls McDermott a quiet writer, and what an apt description that is. Although I think her books are rich in social, political commentary, she seems never to raise her voice. Always some simple story seems at the forefront, and all the commentary occurs naturally within the course of telling the story. If we are being preached to, we only rarely catch sight of the preacher. I think McDermott is also a dedicated and observant feminist, but one who wants to understand men and who understands so well how culture and economics define the roles of both men and women. Perhaps the lives of the girls and women are described with greater emotional detail that those of the boys and men, but even her criticisms are couched in compassion, and she seems always to deal with her male characters fairly and with not only kindness but love.

McDermott is a master at dealing with time. Child of My Heart contains its quiet action within the space of a few weeks of summer, although managing to give us a lot of information about the previous two decades and even some hints about a future never actually reached in the course of the novel. Charming Billy begins and ends with an Irish wake for the just deceased Billy, but spins the reader back half a century, moving from present to past again and again to illumine the events of day. Given how these two novels concentrate on the present and then bring in the past simply as background and explanation, it was quite a surprise to me to discover the linear nature of her recent novel, and her skill in taking us through a much longer period, from the fifties to almost the present in a nearly chronological fashion. In my view, novels work best when they don’t try to cover too much time, and generally writers don’t do well when they attempt to cover a lifetime. This book is the exception; we learn of the entire married lives of the two main characters, Mary and John Keane, as well as the births and maturation of their four children, but the pace seems leisurely, the story told in outline by concentrating on just a few events, and somehow inviting the reader to fill in the spaces, the months and years not described.

Instead of focusing on the lives of the rich and famous or on the adventures of exceptional men and women, McDermott focuses on ordinary people living (on the face of it) quite ordinary lives. What she shows us is just how wonderful and in some sense extraordinary such lives are. The man in the apartment next door whom we may only know as player of the piano lives a rich if to us hidden life, and his story, if only we knew it, is filled with significance, with pain and suffering and joy.

I want to concentrate on just a couple of the themes/questions McDermott raises in this little volume as a way to hopefully arouse your interest and to get you to pick up this book. First, McDermott takes up the question of why it is important to be kind to, even to love, quite unlovable people; second, in quite lovely and sympathetic ways she attempts to explore the emotional distance that seems to exist between men and women, even between men and their loved wives/partners or between fathers and their loved daughters. And although I won’t cite any passages, I (as a quite adamantly non-religious person) find McDermott’s sympathetic exploration of the effects of religion, specifically Catholicism, on the lives of her characters and the community in which they live to be enlightening; she arouses in me a sympathy for religion that I don’t often feel.

We meet the main character in the novel, Mary, on the very day that she is to meet for the first time her future husband, John. Predating that meeting and eventual marriage, Mary’s best friend is her workmate Pauline. Pauline is plain; she lives alone and does not even try to hide her loneliness, her depression, her pervasive pessimism, or her negative judgments about others. As Mary deals with Pauline, not quite wanting to, but feeling that she has no choice, she recalls again and again the counsel of a nun who taught her in the Catholic school she went to. “Feed my lambs, Jesus said. What was the cost of a little kindness toward someone who found her pleasure in being unkind? What was the good, as Sister Clare at school used to say, in loving only the loveable?” Neither John nor Mary’s children can quite understand Mary’s loyalty to Pauline, and Mary wonders sometimes herself why it is she who must care for this lonely, often bitter and uncared for woman. But just as the reader is led slowly to understand the deep love and loyalty that exists between John and Mary, despite his silences and frequent emotional opacity, so too the reader comes to see eventually the bond between these two women. At one point, after Pauline has been called to the home of John and Mary to care for the older children while the frightening and premature birth of the fourth and last child is occurring, she leaves abruptly when Mary and the new baby come home. She tears herself away from the commotion of the happy family in order to give them time to themselves, without having to entertain strangers. She returns to her apartment

… and faced the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things—the yellow light on the polished table, the black night through the slatted blinds, someone laughing at her out in the street. In another few years this terror would catch her by the throat, but tonight she would have another Manhatten with Ed Sullivan. Rinse out her clothes and brush down tomorrow’s suit and iron a blouse. Put on her nightgown and get into bed. There were worse things than this tinny loneliness, these last hours of a Sunday evening.

Mary, who expected in her mid-twenties to be alone forever, to care for her brother and father until the father died, and then to live a solitary life like Pauline’s, is surprised to find herself married to John, older than she, and still quite unknown in the early days of marriage, in some ways never to be known. She has thought that the actual love life, should she ever find it, of husband and wife would “…all be whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as sweetness.” Indeed, even as their bodies work together, as they approach a kind of consummation,

…she glimpsed her husband’s face through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than it would every turn him out towards her. She imagined it was akin to the look the piano player upstairs wore as he worked the keys, that kind of crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored above her. Does he even see my face?

These are just two of many passage in the book where McDermott tries to fathom and to understand an emotional chasm between men and the women they love. That she does this so perceptively but without anger impresses and humbles me.

Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott

I know that most of you passionate readers will understand when I say there some books that are just too lovely to talk about, just no way of getting at what they have to offer short of plunging into them, or in this case, licking them, savoring them. Alice McDermott’s new novel Child of My Heart is just such a book, and I’m hoping to get you to pick it up by saying very little. If I could I would dangle it like a sweet, red lollipop in front of you, just as on the paperback version there is a tree strung with orange and red and yellow lollipops, the rare fruits of imagination. And who says you can’t judge a book by its cover anyway? Certainly, it was the cover of this little book that grabbed me, although it was the name of the author that cemented the purchase.

I have been one of those readers fortunate enough to have large swatches of time laid out before me to read—sometimes whole summers full of nothing but sun and books. That means that when I find an author whom I really like, one that seems to be teaching me as well as enchanting me, I have often been able to read up their life’s work in a few days, a few weeks at most. I still find it a wonderful way to read. Not surprising then that just a few weeks ago I talked to you about one of McDermott’s earlier novels, Charming Billy, and today I feel that I must tell you about this newer one.

The setting is Long Island, sometime in the 90s, and the heroine is a fifteen year old girl who is the only child of aging American-Irish parents who did not have her until they were in their forties. They move to Long Island to, in their minds, assure her future.

Being who they were—children of immigrants, well-read but undereducated—my parents saw my future only in terms of how I would marry, and they saw my opportunities narrowed by Jewish/Irish/Polish/Italian kids who swarmed the city and the close-in neighborhoods where they could afford to buy a home. They moved way out on Long Island because they knew rich people lived way out on Long Island, even if only for the summer months, and putting me in a place where I might be spotted by some of them was their equivalent of offering me every opportunity.

This urge to put their daughter, Theresa, in the paths of the rich also accounts at least partly for their not only allowing her to baby-sit for families from the time she is only ten years old, but actively encouraging her to take on more and more charges as the summers roll by, to visit more and more of the big summer homes that her parents can only admire from afar. And Theresa is from the beginning a star at what she does. A beautiful, dark girl who is wise far beyond her years, but who also strangely innocent and unworldly.

I must have fit right into the pretty summer dreams those pretty young mothers had back on Fifth Avenue in March….Pretty, intelligent, mature in speech although undeveloped physically (another plus), well immersed in my parents’ old-fashioned Irish Catholic manners (inherited from their parents, who had spent their careers in service to this very breed of American rich), and, best of all, beloved by children and pets.

I don’t know how to account for it, my way with small creatures. Nor did it ever occur to me to try. Because I was a child myself when I began to take care of other children, I saw them from the start as only a part of my realm, and saw my ascendance as a simple matter of hierarchy—I was the oldest (if only by a year or two) among them, and as such, I would naturally be worshipped and glorified. I really thought nor more of it than that. And when they clung to me and petted me, when the boys, lovesick, put their heads into my lap and the girls begged to wear my rings or comb my hair, I simply took it as my due. I was Titania among her fairies…..and the dogs and cats and bunnies and gerbils that seemed to follow their young owners in their affection were only doing what nature, in our little realm, prescribed. ……If there was any trick, any knack, to my success as a minder of children, it was, I suppose, the fact that I was as delighted with my charges as they were with me.

This entire little book is simply the unfolding of a few days in Theresa’s life. For one family she merely walks their dog, Red Rover, and occasionally tends their children on a weekend. For another, she comes by every morning to walk two Scotty dogs. Yet another family has her tending three cats while they are in the city, babysitting both their children and their cats on the weekends. And finally, she cares daily for a young girl, Flora, whose father is a famous old painter and whose mother, decades younger, feels imprisoned on Long Island and escapes often to the city. The insights Theresa has as she goes from house to house, child to child, animal to animal, are charming and yet somehow alarming in their profundity. Added to her paid duties, she also supplies daily care and attention for a handful of dirty kids who live next door and who love her, adore her, hang on her at every chance. The pied-piper of Long Island who finds it quite natural to be followed and adored. And finally, for the few days that this novel covers, a young girl cousin, Daisy Mae, joins Theresa on her daily rounds, invited by Theresa so that the shy and frail Daisy can escape for a time from the city, her seven siblings and her overworked, cranky parents.

I simply cannot describe how lovely the relationship is between Daisy and Theresa—two minds who can together spin magic out of the air. Slowly, the reader discovers (along with Theresa), that Daisy is quite ill—bruises on her body that do not heal, a tiredness that will not go away even in the sun and sea-breezes. I cannot but think that this novel is deeply autobiographical. The precociousness of Theresa, her deep understanding of her own parents and of all the adults around her seems more remembered than made up. And despite her girlish thinness, she is well aware of the new looks she gets from older men, their unapologetic appraisal of her pretty face, her budding body. If anything, she is even calmer than they in her appraisal of their appraisal, already wiser than they. Interested in their attention, but not really alarmed, she realizes a power she has with them, understands more about them than they about her. She also understands on a deep level that she is already wiser than her parents, has already stepped away from their world, careful not to tell them more than they need to know, protecting them even as they see themselves as protecting her. As she listens through the thin walls of their little cottage to the calm, constant river of their voices, she understands that she is as much caregiver now as cared for.

Whenever reviewers strive to find authors with whom to compare McDermott the name Jane Austin invariably arises, and it easy to see why. Her novels begin in very small worlds, usually in a family or two, more novels of families and customs than of worlds and wars. One reviewer talks of how beautifully written her novels are and how quietly unsettling. Yes indeed. Wrenchingly beautiful and unsettling due to their wisdom, the acuteness of the observing eye. I was in the middle of two other novels when I started this one; those two remain unfinished. McDermott must be read.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

There are some novels that are so self-contained, so organically whole, that it seems not only pointless but somehow rude to talk about them, to attempt an overview or summation. As you might have guessed, I’m going to try to talk about just such a novel today. Its title is Charming Billy, and the author is Alice McDermott. I suppose if I say that it is a novel about Irish-Americans living in the Bronx, about families and religion, faith and love, I will have offered some sort of informative overview, but I will not have even begun to get at the charm and profundity of Charming Billy.

On the face of it, this is about as simple a story as one could imagine. It begins with a gathering of Irish-Americans come together to eulogize one of their own, the charming and romantic Billy. And in many ways, it not only begins there, but ends there as well. Some writers have such incredible talent and facility with language that they can, while apparently telling us about a single event, capture a lifetime, and in McDermott’s novel, not only the lifetime of one character, but of a whole family, a whole community. Like casting a stone into a still pond and watching the ripples move outward in all directions, so the single stone of this story, Billy’s death and the wake that follows, allows the author to travel backwards in time and out into the lives of many others. I will be giving away nothing that the reader is not told in the first few pages if I tell you that charming Billy is a man who has loved and lost, the loss becoming the pivot point for the rest of his life. So loyal is Billy to his lost Eva that his friends, especially his men friends, suppose that he will never find another woman again, indeed, that he will never allow himself to look. Instead, he will try to replace with alcohol what has been lost to him, and though never losing his charm, his wit, his easy smile and engaging stories, will fall slowly but inevitably into alcoholism and death. And each of the men will live vicariously through Billy an undying love, an unshakable faith, a pure romance.

McDermott gets to be a kind of fly on the wall, listening to the men who love Billy and who love Billy’s love, talk about what might have been, about the great, profound lost love. She accomplishes this by making her narrator a kind of incidental figure in the grouping, the young daughter of Dennis, who is Billy’s cousin and best friend. The daughter is home briefly from college to attend Billy’s funeral. The men can (and do) pretty much ignore her; they have known her since she was a child, indeed still view her as a child, insider by birth and blood, but outsider both because she is merely a woman and because she did not know Eva, did not know Billy when he was still whole and vibrant. She can eavesdrop on their conversations, their versions of Billy’s story, and they will only barely notice that she is there.

While the men take center stage in this novel, and while it is ostensibly about them—their lives, their love of Billy, their connections to one another and to alcohol, my view is that McDermott is more interested in the lives of the women who shadow these great drinkers and talkers. The men dream and drink and talk, the women live and provide, give birth and carry on. Even as Billy and Dennis, just home from World War II, begin to woo two sisters, Eva and Mary, and thus launch the love story that is apparently at the center of this novel, Dennis’ mother has remarried a moderately wealthy German shoe salesman, moved into his house, and set up an ironing board that will never be taken down again.

There was a laundry list of reasons why she had married again and not one of them had anything to do with love, but with enough space (when you came right down to it), enough baseboard and yard and empty room, enough heat in the winter and sufficient windows to open for a cross breeze in summer, love was an easy thing to do without.

Another shadow figure in the novel is Maeve, the woman whom Billy eventually meets and marries (much to the chagrin of all of his men friends who remain loyal to the lost Eva). Maeve is plain and colorless, nothing like the beautiful lost Eva; she is a woman who presided over the death of her mother, and then became the cook and housecleaner and caretaker for her sick, alcoholic father. Billy’s friends are less than surprised when she becomes the caretaker for Billy as well; they see it as magnanimous on his part that he rescues plain Maeve from spinsterhood and allows her to pour him into bed at night, sick-drunk from alcohol, sometimes having to call Dennis to come help her literally carry him upstairs to bed. Poor Billy, they think, his alcoholism not a disease, but a palliative for his great, lost love. Does Maeve know, they wonder, about the Irish woman, the lovely Eva? Does she understand why she can never really replace Eva in Billy’s heart?

Billy is a charming figure, handsome and witty; he always has a story to tell. He works two jobs to save up the money that he needs to bring Eva back from Ireland, determined to bring her and her sisters too if she cannot leave them behind. Indeed, he will bring over the whole family if that is what is required. So great is his love. No sacrifice is too great for such a love.

But even as he sweats and slaves, working for Con Ed in the day, working in a shoe-store some nights and every weekend, all in the name of love, his aunt, Dennis’ mother, grieves for both her own son and for Billy. Not because they lose their loves, but because they sacrifice their lives simply to survive.

Although at that time in her life she had held only two jobs herself—one in a bakery in Brooklyn, one in the mailroom of the gas company—she had a considered opinion about what the workaday world could do to you, and it wasn’t a very high opinion, either, despite her Protestant blood.

In part, she objected to the monotony of nine-to-five, the tedium, the hours and days you ended up wishing away, swinging from one Saturday morning to another like a monkey at the zoo. In part, it was the anonymity: Forget what dreams you’d dreamt the night before, forget the adoring eye that beheld you over breakfast, or even the grief that had been wringing out your soul all night long, because the way she saw it, once you boarded the subway or the bus or joined the crawling stream of automobiles or found your space in the revolving door, the elevator, behind the desk or the counter or the machine, you became what you really were—you became, when you got right down to it, what you really were: one of the so many million, just one more.

So, as she watches her boy Dennis, her nephew Billy, go off to work for Con Ed, she grieves for what they might have been, what they might have done had they been able to define themselves through their work rather than sacrificing their lives to work. Let the men drink and lament the loss of the Great Love, the incomparable (because unreachable) Eva; she will grieve instead for what they might have done, what they might have been, what they might have created.

At least as I read it, all the men in the story want to know about Eva, what really happened, why she never came. They want to wonder what might have been had the great romance flowered. And I would not want to suggest that McDermott is an unsympathetic storyteller of their stories, their loves and lives and losses. Still, both the narrator and the author are women who lived with and loved these men, and it is the story of the women, the shadows, that most interested me, and I suspect it is the one that McDermott most wanted to tell. It is a quiet little book, told by a storyteller so gifted that it is easy to miss the social and political significance and simply flow with the story. It is also a book that is easy to put down even after you have begun to read it; I hope you will pick it up again. It deserves to be cradled and savored; let it sink in. Notice the shadows as well as the light.