Charming Billy

McDermott opens at Billy Lynch's funeral lunch, where the assembled family and friends retell, with the fondness of long repetition, the story that supposedly explains Billy's decades of drinking: a doomed young love, Eva, an Irish girl he met and fell for one summer, promised to wed once he'd saved enough money, and lost when word came that she'd fallen ill and passed back in Ireland before he could send for her. McDermott lets the novel sit inside that grief for a while before revealing, through the narrator's cousin Dennis, that the story is a fabrication Dennis himself constructed and maintained for thirty years: Eva didn't fall ill at all, she took another man's money instead of waiting for Billy, and Dennis chose to tell Billy the gentler version rather than let him learn he'd been abandoned for cash.

The novel's real subject is what a family does with a story once it's built a life around it, since Billy's drinking, his devotion to the patient, loving Maeve he eventually marries, his whole self-understanding as a man permanently faithful to a lost love, all rest on a fiction Dennis told to spare him one specific pain and inflicted instead a longer, vaguer one. McDermott's narrator, Dennis's own daughter, pieces the true history together as an adult, and the novel becomes as much about her reckoning with inherited family myth, what gets preserved, what gets quietly edited, as it is about Billy himself.

Dennis's decision to tell Billy the gentler version rather than the humiliating truth is presented by the family, and for a long time by the novel itself, as an act of mercy, sparing his cousin a specific rejection in favor of a grief with dignity attached to it. McDermott complicates that mercy steadily: a lie built to protect someone from one truth still shapes every subsequent year of his life, and Dennis's kindness reads, the longer the novel sits with it, as much like a convenient story for Dennis himself to tell as a gift freely given to Billy.

McDermott tells the story almost entirely out of chronological order, beginning at the funeral and circling back through decades of scenes the reader has to actively reassemble, a structure that mirrors exactly how family history actually gets transmitted, in fragments, at gatherings, revised slightly with each new telling. The novel's form argues implicitly that Billy's life was never a straight line toward tragedy so much as a story continually being reconstructed by the people who loved him, which is also, not incidentally, what the novel itself is doing to him.