Charming Billy (Criticism)

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines the tensions between illusion and reality in the novel.

Alice McDermott's celebrated novel, Charming Billy opens at a funeral luncheon, where forty-seven friends and relatives gather to mourn and to reminisce about Billy Lynch in a Bronx restaurant that could have been taken from a scene in an Irish play by John Millington Synge. The setting, however, is not the only touch of the Irish in the novel. The particular sensibility that Alice McDermott infuses throughout Charming Billy reflects what John Millington Synge calls in his preface to his play, The Playboy of the Western World, a "popular [Irish] imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender." The Irish penchant for employing the imagination in the telling of stories becomes the focus of the novel as McDermott explores the lure of the creative rendering of experience as well as its inevitable clash with reality.

As Billy's friends and relatives gather together at his funeral, each of them feels compelled to tell"the story of his life, or the story they would begin to re-create for him this afternoon." Their versions often conflict with each other, as they focus on love and loss, delusion, and reality. Thrown out of focus by time and private agendas, their colorful stories ask a central question that examines the book's title. Was Billy a charming personality or is the portrait that is created a charming recreation of him? McDermott delineates this tension between imagination and reality when, at the end of the first chapter, after she has given voice to several of these stories, she ends with the truth about the central lie of the book — Eva, the love of Billy's life, never died.

Rand Richards Cooper in his article for Commonweal writes: "McDermott frames Billy's life story in ironies, stinting neither the cost nor the complexity of his romanticism." Billy's cousin, Dennis reveals the irony that sets the tone for the entire book when he tells the others about his first view of Billy's corpse. He notes that Billy's face was "bloated to twice its size and his skin was [so] dark brown" from alcoholism that Dennis could not recognize him at first, insisting when he saw the body, "But this is a colored man." This amalgam of illusion and reality begins the novel's examination of Billy and its illustration of the difficulties inherent in the attempt to gain an objective view of reality.

Much of the talk at the funeral focuses on Billy's drinking and its cause. The guests argue over whether Billy's alcoholism was inevitable, springing from an Irish propensity for drink or from his tragic love for Eva. Dennis and his daughter, who as the central narrator tries to weave together all of the stories about Billy into an accurate portrait of him, wrestle with a more complex issue concerning Billy's love for Eva. Was Billy destroyed by Eva's failure to return from Ireland or by Dennis's lie about her having died? Would Billy have been able to accept Eva's rejection more readily than her untimely demise? As Dennis and his daughter struggle to find answers to these questions, they explore the complex nature of illusion and truth and ultimately the vagaries of human destiny.

The question about the effect of the lie becomes central as McDermott dismisses the insistence that Billy's fate was determined by his heritage. Billy's sister Rosemary argues that "Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve," concluding "[e]very alcoholic's life is pretty much the same." Cooper notes, however, that those characters such as Rosemary who blame genetics "come off as pinched and zealous proponents of our era's mistaken urge to collapse tragedy into (mere) pathology: a reductively pragmatic approach, McDermott clearly believes, to the mysteries of human existence."

McDermott adds a nice ironic touch to the discussion the members of the funeral party have of Billy's drinking when she notes the connection between "the drinks in their hands and the drink that had killed him." Yet, she concludes, the enjoyment of the drinks is redeemed "in the company of old friends, from the miserable thing that a drink had become in his life." The gathering of these friends helps redeem "the affection they had felt for him, once torn apart by his willfulness, his indifference, making something worthwhile of it, something valuable that had been well spent, after all." This then becomes the motive of McDermott's storytellers, to discover that valuable essence to Billy, which will prove that his time and theirs "had been well spent, after all."

The portrait that emerges most clearly of Billy in the narrative is that of a fragile romantic, ultimately destroyed by his unrequited love for a young Irish girl, which he claimed to his cousin Dan, was every year, every hour "a weight on his shoulders." Dennis explains to his daughter that he decided to lie about Eva's fate to try to ease Billy's suffering, claiming, "better he be brokenhearted than trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness." Yet, Dennis remains conflicted about what he has done. Noting the fine line between illusion and reality that was walked by his community, he notes the "audacious, outlandish" nature of the lie and concludes that "the workaday world, the world without illusion (except Church-sanctioned) or nonsense (except alcohol-bred)," the world of the Irish Catholics in Queens, "didn't much abide audacious and outlandish. Not for long, anyway."

Dennis's lie caused Billy to maintain a romantic vision of Eva, one that was constructed by him from the first moment he met her. While the relatives at the funeral cannot agree on whether she was beautiful, and his sister Kate claims that she was "a little chubby," to Billy, she was an angel. The first time he saw her, his nearsightedness caused him to see "her as a mirage of smeared color a mirage that perhaps only wild hope and great imagination could form into a solid woman." He fell in love with her "before she had even come clearly into his view." That afternoon "he fell in love with the rest of his life," which he envisioned now as a "golden future," an "Eden." Billy could not recognize that "adrift in the same world that held their fine future there was accident and disappointment, a sickening sense of false hope and false promise that required all of God's grace tokeep at bay."

McDermott refuses to provide a clear, objective portrait of Billy, including any answers concerning the consequences of his devotion to his romanticized image of Eva. Dennis recognized the need to devote oneself to an imaginative vision of reality when he gave Billy the money to send for Eva. He understood then "what Billy's fine dream, Billy's faith, was going to come to. But he also saw, in his own romantic heart, that its consummation would become a small redemption for them all." Yet later, Dennis insists that it was better for Billy to discover the truth about Eva so that he "didn't go through his whole life deceived about it. Didn't die thinking about some lovely reunion in the sweet hereafter." Ultimately, McDermott leaves open the question of whether the truth or the illusion about Eva caused Billy to drink himself to death.

McDermott also refuses to take a definitive stance on the effect that Maeve had on Billy's life. At one point, the narrator insists that "her presence in the shoe store was Billy's salvation, or at least his second chance," but by the end of the paragraph, after an attempt to analyze whether the clearly plain Maeve had perhaps a "certain beauty," she concludes that "Maeve was only a faint consolation, a futile attempt to mend an irreparably broken heart. A moment's grace, a flash of optimism, not enough for a lifetime."

The narrator does, however, come to some conclusions. She recognizes the human capacity to believe and to be deceived, and determines, "you can't have one without the other, each one side of the other." In her final assessment of Billy and ultimately of human nature, she concludes that, as with all those gathered together to remember Billy, their faith "was no less keen than their suspicion that in the end they might be proven wrong. And their certainty that they would continue to believe anyway." Billy becomes for them an almost mythical emblem of human frailty as well as a courageous romantic who refused to give up his dreams.

In Charming Billy, McDermott deftly illuminates the interpretive gifts of the Irish and the subsequent tension they can produce between imagination and truth. Ultimately, the lure of the dream cannot be reconciled with objective reality, yet, she suggests, we can recognize its ephemeral nature and still persist in reaching out for it, as if "what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all."

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Charming Billy, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

What Do I Read Next?

• John Millington Synge's 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World, which addresses the theme of illusion and reality, focuses on the reception given to Christy Mahon, as he wanders into a small Irish village, declaring that he has just murdered his father.
• Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, published in 1996, is an award-winning novel that traces the lives of a poor family in Ireland headed by an alcoholic father.
• McDermott's A Bigamist's Daughter (1982) focuses on the impact of the past on the present.
• In Irish America (2001), Maureen Dezell chronicles Irish Americans' lives from the 1840s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.