Finished Sa 5/21/16 The third day after the hernia repair surgery.
One of the better novels that I've ever read. Really a cut above!
Author's page at Wikipedia-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_McDermott
wikipedia-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charming_Billy
Billy and Dennis meet two Irish girls, Mary and Eva at the end of WWII. Billy falls for Eva and although she is returning to Ireland, he offers to pay to bring her back. Dennis has a brief sexual relationship with Mary, but, in the end, he's uninterested.
Eva takes Billy's money and marries another guy from Ireland. Mary tells this to Dennis, but he decides that it would be more emotionally humane to tell Billy that she died of tuberculosis. Decades later the full story is revealed.
The narrator is Dennis's adult daughter. I don't think she is identified by name. This offers a strange perspective.
The novel is chock full of colorful characters.
The longest scene is the beginning of the novel- Billy's funeral. He was so poisoned by alcohol that when Dennis identifies the body, at first he thinks that it is a black man.
CHARMING BILLY won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the American Book Award, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award. The novel was published by FSG in 1997.
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