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Epicurus.com - Charming Billy
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
Your Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385333344
ISBN: 038533334X
Label: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 1999-01-12
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Release Date: 1999-01-12
Studio: Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Editorial Reviews:
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Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered at a small Bronx bar. They have come to comfort his widow and to eulogize one of the last great romantics, trading tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and unfathomable sorrow. As they linger on into this extraordinary night, their voices form Billy's tragic story and their mourning becomes a gentle homage to all the lives in their small community fractured by grief, shattered by secrets, and sustained by the simple dream of love.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: What's the real truth?
Comment: Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. The true genius of this story lies in McDermott's telling of the same events from different points of view at different points in time, demonstrating the lack of objectivity and certainty that surrounds everyday life. More than anything else, Billy (like all of us) is a disparate collection of stories and opinions and myths as viewed by his friends and family. Fabulous!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Confusing and boring
Comment: I bought this book for a dollar from a supermarket for charity and I found it to be boring and pointless. The story was confusing and depressing. Didn't make much sense though. I'm sorry that I wasted a dollar on this worthless book. I didn't like this book at all. Even though it was short, I had to force myself to finish it. It seemed like it was at least 500 pages.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, bittersweet book
Comment: I enjoyed Charming Billy because it is sweet and nostalgic. It is a sensitive book in which feelings play the major part. Its best scenes take place on Long Island, just after the war, when Billy and his cousin meet the Irish girls who will transform their lives. The descriptions are atmospheric, the action slow-paced, the situations understated.
This book is like a rose whose petals are plucked one by one. It begins with Billy's funeral. Piece by piece, it tells the chain of events that has led to his death, from the fateful encounter with the Irish girl, in his early adulthood. Billy is sentimental. Billy wants to believe not just in love, but that love is what gives meaning to life. Ultimately this only leads to waste, as he is duped by a worthless woman and protected against his own best interests by his well-meaning cousin. Or does it? Was his belief, his sincerity what made Billy charming? Ms McDermott lets us decide.
The book has interesting contrasts between the post-war and depression years, and more recent times. It is set among the Irish-American community. While it is different in style from the darkly sarcastic and humorous Angela's Ashes, there are intriguing comparisons to make between the two, and Charming Billy may be worth reading as a `sequel' to the Irish book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Touching, tragic tale
Comment: Charming Billy is the story of a man who touches the lives of everyone he meets, especially his large Irish Catholic family. He has the gift of gab, is an honest man who goes out of his way for others, and, perhaps above all, hurts himself and the ones he loves with his alcoholism. While renovating a house on Long Island with his cousin and best friend, Dennis, Billy meets Eva, an Irish girl who is in the States to nanny for a wealthy family, and he falls completely in love with her. Sadly, things don't work out, and Billy uses this as his lifelong excuse to drink himself to death. The author is clear, however, that the end of the relationship isn't the cause of the alcoholism. That disease, of course, was raging even before that happened.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Billy's cousin's daughter, at times directed to her husband, and I admit that I found this to be awkward. The relationship between her and her husband is never developed at all - it really couldn't even be called a sub-plot. I think the author should have left that out.
Another reviewer mentioned surprise at the three-star rating of this book, and I must say, I agree. A common factor in the 5-star reviews seems to be that we see our family in these people, and this is definitely true for me. We're a practicing Catholic, Irish family and I kept imagining this story taking place in my late grandmother's house (although we're from Cleveland, not New York). I saw Billy, Dennis, and Daniel in my relatives. The author does a superb job of capturing the life, mannerisms, and emotions of the Irish-American family. She obviously lived it. Just as I probably wouldn't understand the dynamics of, say, an Italian-American family, maybe it's difficult for others to see what the big deal is. On a side note, I also must add that is was very refreshing to see my religion presented in a positive light in a popular novel instead of the usual negativity.
Definitely read this book, especially is you have Irish roots. I will bet you'll be surprised about the parallels between your family and Billy's.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Fine McDermott Work
Comment: Yet another fine novel by McDermott. The tone is absolutely spot on, not at all undermined by sentimentality, yet extremely sympathetic. It is part a result of this tone that these characters come to inhabit not only the pages of this book, but also the readers' own consciousnesses. Another contributor to this effect results from McDermott's incredible eye for detail. A striking example surfaces in her description of a simple kitchen implement, a juicer, giving such rich details that the juicer acquires is own history and thus life force, some of which is transfered onto the character making the observations about it: "Cut oranges and squeezed them under his palm on an old-fashioned glass juicer. The very one, in fact, his mother had used when he was young, in the apartment in Woodside. The very one, washed up on this shore somehow after what he imagined had been a long newspaper-wrapped odyssey, box-bound, from that tiny kitchen in Queens to the basement of Holtzman's house in Jamaica (years passing there, light in the narrow basement window and then darkness, light again, a thousand times over while he himself returned from overseas, met Mary, met Claire, married, had children) until someone--himself? Holtzman? His mother?--hoisted the box marked Kitchen Things and brought it out here to the Long Island house, where it dropped out of his sight for years and then returned again as something he shared with Mr. West while he was still "my mother's tenant" and not yet "my daughter's father-in-law" and then found himself on this morning in April, the second morning with Billy .... surprised and even delighted by the thing, by the things that ride out time."
The character's amazement and delight at the story of the juicer (the juicer acts as a catalyst for then an amplifier of the characters' creation of his own life's story) are the vehicles transferring life from the juicer to the characters and because of our own delight and amusement at such a story, to the readers.
McDermott is particularly adept at such observations and they appear throughout Charming Billy -- it would be worth reading just to enjoy such descriptions. But her story of ordinary, yet so extraordinary lives is so much more.
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