Billy's Ashes

By John Skow

Billy Lynch, a lovely, funny man (a hopeless, lifelong drunk), is dead in middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes.

The story is all there, a clear-eyed sketch of lower-middle-class Irish-American life, in a dozen paragraphs of bar conversation. "He had the sweetest nature," says a cousin. "He found a way to like everyone, he really did...He could always get you laughing." Another voice: "God, wasn't he funny?" The author interpolates: "Not missing the irony of the drinks in their hands and the drink that had killed him, but redeeming, perhaps, the pleasure of a drink or two, on a sad, wet afternoon, in the company of old friends, from the miserable thing that a drink had become in his life." McDermott goes on, deadly accurate: "The fruit salad was canned but served with a little scoop of lime sherbet, which was refreshing, everyone agreed."

If the rest of the novel is simply a working out of what has been said and left unsaid at this funeral supper (congratulations to the widow are unspoken, of course), it's not the worst way to tell a story. One plot contrivance, however, seems awkward: as a young man, we're told, Billy fell loony in love with Eva, a visitor from Ireland, and after she went home, sent her passage money to return and marry him. For years he believed (as his best friend had told him, inventing the tale to protect the sanity of a fragile romantic) that she had died tragically on the eve of her departure. In fact she had married another man and used Billy's money to buy a gas station. This sad affair, which reads like a parody verse of Danny Boy, doesn't work as a reason for Billy's drinking. He was an alcoholic before meeting Eva, and his parched life and shabby death--and McDermott's fine novel--would have been the same had she never existed.

--J.S.