McDermott, Alice Books

Charming Billy

Alice Mcdermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 301 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity, and resignation's hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens, New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve." After World War II, both young men had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family--"marveling, marveling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives."

By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the U.S., Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anesthesia of alcohol.

Alice McDermott's quiet, striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial wishes. She seems far less interested in the shock of revelation than in her characters' power to live through personal disaster. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide.

After This

Alice Mcdermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Exquisite writing 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is a bit like a gorgeous still-life painting. Things happen, but mostly the story doesn't seem to be the important part of the story. The writing is the real joy in this book, the images, the word choice, the delicate, perfect grace that is each sentence. That's what shines for me here. It is sometimes hard to slow down enough to really enjoy this book. It requires a kind of patience and attention to detail that is not common or easy to maintain in modern life. Reading this for me has been a little bit like eating my vegetables. And I love vegetables. It's just hard sometimes to make that initial effort and choice with all the other junk around.

Editorial Review:

On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux–and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.

Child of My Heart: A Novel

Alice McDermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all. --Claire Dederer

That Night

Alice Mcdermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Do yourself a favor -- read something else. 2 out of 5 stars.
9 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Men actually leave their yards and talk to one another. Children lie to each other about who does and who does not know how babies are made. Women spy on the house of another woman they don't much care for. And perhaps most shocking of all, Mrs. Carpenter sits in a chair that she purchased with no intention of sitting in. It sounds like suburbia to me. But in Alice McDermott's That Night, these actions are highly transgressive acts that violate the limits of the characters' previously circumscribed roles in the neighborhood. For men, that means not leaving your yard and barely saying hello to anyone. For women, the role is that of the stay-at-home gossip, fantasizing about widowhood and asking, about Sheryl's mother Ann: "What can you do for a woman like that?" What cataclysmic event incited these changes? A boyfriend wants to talk to his girlfriend. He and his friends confront her mother. Violence ensues, jarring the denizens of this neighborhood out of their own despair over the "difficult, enduring stuff of daily life," (36) and for a while, the community is transformed. Soon enough though, men go back to barely acknowledging each other, and "that night" becomes little more than a touchstone for the neighborhood gossip. This is suburbia according to McDermott: a tragedy happens in the lives of people you barely know, and at first glance it appears that the neighbors are rallying around the sufferers, when in fact, suburbanites need the pain of others to distract them from their own voids, and get a secondary benefit of always having something to talk about.
Our source of information about "that night," (a phrase invoked throughout the work to the point of heavy-handedness) the narrator, informs us "even children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller." (157) While this maxim seems self-evident when one is reading works such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, or the more recent, Middlesex, it certainly gave me pause when I read it in That Night. What are we to make of this statement, when McDermott does not let the narrator be known by us? Clues are sprinkled throughout as to what this person has been up to since "that night," but they don't add up to a character I can put my trust in, essential in a work where the narrator is the empathic vessel through which the reader witnesses all of the events of and surrounding "that night." She tells us about Sheryl's relationship with Rick; she tells us about Sheryl's experience in Ohio, and she is absent from both scenarios, as well as many others she also tells us about. This "ability" of the narrator to report on events that she did not attend led me to wonder whether or not as an adult she was imagining/inventing an entire sweeping context for a traumatic event she witnessed one evening during her childhood. Continuously, I asked myself: how would the narrator know this? I understand that sometimes the reader must accept the conventions that a novelist employs, but I felt here plausibility is under too much of a strain.
Eugenides avoids this trap in Middlesex by engaging us with a narrator we know a lot about - we know who Cal is, what he would or would not say, how he would act in a given situation - and by making him essential to the action of the story. McDermott doesn't even give her narrator a name. And yet, at the end of the book, much attention is paid to the demise of her marriage, and the selling of her parents' house. I found this to be a very curious choice on McDermott's part: why develop her character in the last chapter of the book when there was so little development before this point? Then I got to page 164, when the narrator talks to Rick, now a defeated man, who has come to look at her parents' house. She "asked him, `Do you know why she [Sheryl] moved away?' There was a coy hint of gossip in my voice...." The narrator is happy and quick to open old wounds for Rick. Whoever the little girl was that witnessed "that night," she has become one of the adults around her at the time, a person obsessed with one small event emblematic of the misery of other people. Sounds like a suburbanite to me.

Editorial Review:

On a warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly a car careens onto a family’s neat front yard, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains and leather, and a young man cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight fathers will pick up snow shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fueled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about and remember as the moment everything changed forever.

At Weddings and Wakes

Alice Mcdermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Like Monet 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

More like a Monet than a photograph, McDermott's, "At Weddings and Wakes" reveals its beauty by memory impressions rather than by the harsh black lines of plot. No less lost than others who have written here in the ebb and flow of the timeline, I, however, trusted the author. And soon I was intermixing with the memories of the book my own childhood memories - and identifying, in the moment, with the joys and tragedies of this family. I dare suggest any who read this book, liking it or not, will find themselves remembering family stories of times past - memories happy and sad, with characters tragic and heroic and possibly rethinking them in the light of McDermott's graceful treatment of such moments. It was an exquiste read. That is, for those who are comfortable with impressions leading you to see clearly the beauty in life's tragedies and joys, as like a Monet painting. But if you need/seek/want the clarity of a photograph for beauty - skip this book.

Editorial Review:

Telling a story through the eyes of children is a tricky business, which is that much more proof of what a magician Alice McDermott happens to be. At Weddings and Wakes, her engrossing portrayal of love and tragedy in an Irish-Catholic family, takes us along with the kids as they accompany their mother on weekly visits to a world of memory and recrimination in the family's old Brooklyn neighborhood. An exquisitely executed little novel that masks all its hard work and complex structure behind finely wrought lace curtains of craft.

A Bigamist's Daughter

Alice Mcdermott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 2.0 of 5

What Was the Point? 1 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Elizabeth Connelly works for a Manhattan vanity press. When Tupper Daniels, a sure-to-be-published author presents her with the story of a bigamist in his southern hometown, she jokingly kids that her own father had more than one wife.

Tupper's book lacks an ending, and Elizabeth seriously considers whether her father was indeed a bigamist. Together author and editor forge a relationship to search for the end of one story and the truth of another. I reached the end of A BIGAMIST'S DAUGHTER without resolution to either quest. I'm not even sure what becomes of Tupper and Elizabeth, the couple.

As a story that describes itself as "an absolutely contemporary portrait of a new generation's search for--and avoidance of--committment in life and love," it's not a picture I would hang on a wall.

Editorial Review:

Elizabeth Connelly sits in a New York office that looks like a real editor’s, but isn’t quite. Employed at a vanity press, Elizabeth watches the real world—of real struggles, passion, pain, and love—spin around her. Until one day, a young writer comes to her with a novel about a man who loves more than one woman at once. And suddenly Elizabeth will be awakened from her young urban professional slumber—by a man’s real touch, by a real story in search of an ending, by the unraveling of the greatest masquerade of all—in Alice McDermott’s luminous novel of memory, revelation, and desire.

Charming Billy: Reading Group Guide

Alice McDermott

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En Bodas Y Entierros (Andanzas)

Alice McDermott

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Aquella Noche

Alice McDermott

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