Dear Misfits,
We’ve finished another wonderfully written
novel. Alice McDermott’s story of Charming Billy depicts a man
beset with an uncontrollable addiction to alcohol. The novel is a
poignant evocation of an Irish American Catholic family as they struggle to
understand the tragic affliction of one of their members, a man who lived a
life completely in the grip of alcoholism. The novel asks this basic
question: Was Billy Lynch's death by alcohol the result of being told that Eva,
the love of his life, had died shortly after she returned to
Ireland. Billy finds out 30 years later that she had not died as he was
led to believe by his cousin but that she had betrayed him by marrying another
man in Ireland? Or was his death caused by a genetic weakness for
alcohol? These two questions are tough to answer.
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| Long Island Beach |
As we see in the story of Billy, alcoholism can
be a deeply troubling, family destroying affliction. Perhaps the most
telling line in the novel is expressed by the narrator when she observes at
Billy’s funeral that he had “ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend
to do, the great deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of
the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room.”
In end we are left to decide for ourselves if
Billy’s alcoholism was “a disease” as thought by many in the family or was it a
personal choice as observed by his cousin Dennis when he says Billy
always had a reason to drink because, “an alcoholic can always find a reason
but never needs one”.
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