![]() ![]() ![]() You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books. When you close the book and go to sleep, the next morning you wake up and you can't remember that you never knew Billy at all. ![]() Memory does not work in straight lines, nor should the art that reveals it. In her pages one encounters characters passing like paper ducks on a pond.ĭissolution and violence lie just beneath - psychic, emotional and often physical, and certainly the threat of all these. McDermott (At Weddings and Wakes, 1992, etc.) extends her view of Irish-American life with this gentle portrait of an alcoholic freshly dead from drink. She gives you quiet successions of words that take shape in well-structured paragraphs, as if you the reader were watching her practicing origami. McDermott controls the tone through perfectly composed sentences. Instead, you feel with her, you partake in her emotions. Charming Billy: A Novel by Alice McDermott 3.3 (12) Paperback 18.00 Paperback 18.00 eBook 11.99 Audiobook 0. ![]() She doesn't lead you to empathize or sympathize with Billy. All this is told not by a friend or a daughter, which would be too obvious, but by Dennis' daughter. Because she unfolds her story slowly, and you learn about what happened only gradually, you discover with the narrator, the finder-outer, as it were, why Billy's melancholy ran so deep, and why a romance of sadness can seduce the young. ![]()
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