Alice McDermott's skein of stories
Rereading Alice McDermott's National Book Award-winning novel Charming Billy in preparation for her Hassett Series reading tonight at Canisius College, I was reminded of how much we are not only products of our own circumstances, but also of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves, the stories that are told about us, and which of these stories we choose to believe or disbelieve about ourselves and others. For McDermott--one of our finest weavers of the skein of stories that form the shadowy interiors of domestic life--the idea of family is as much a narrative construct as it is a genetic and socioeconomic one.
McDermott, who will read from and discuss her work tonight at 7 p.m. in Canisius College's Montante Cultural Center, excels at what one critic once referred to as "the literature of wry sorrow," a compact, unsentimentalized, contemporary retelling of material that has mythic roots and impulses--almost all of it set in Irish-American, Catholic neighborhoods of Queens, New York and Long Island from 1940 to the present. One of the issues Charming Billy asks us to consider is whether or not an entire life can be undone by a single well-intended lie.
Charming Billy inspired numerous comparisons between McDermott's narrative style and that of James Joyce in his classic story "The Dead" (the last and best-known of his early stories in the Dubliners collection), especially with respect to the novel reading as a narrative interpolation of overheard stories from which the reader may form a different interpretation than the narrator. Revisiting the early chapters of the book may also remind readers of certain narrative techniques that are imported from cinema--the long tracking shots of classic movies, for instance--where the nuances of context are often conveyed by a casual remark, a single unsettling detail.
--R.D. Pohl
