"Charming Billy" - Engaging the Reader

Prompt #1: One of the author's goals at the beginning of a novel is to fully engage her reader. Select a passage from the first half of "Charming Billy" that you found particularly interesting and explain how you think it contributes to engaging the reader in the novel.

Alice McDermott's novel "Charming Billy" doesn't seem as much a novel as a compilation of life stories. Part of what makes this novel so vivid and enthralling is the way the author constructs her characters, and constructs their lives around each other. In the middle of these intertwined stories is Billy, the titular character, whose funeral introduces us to the world these characters live in. Billy is the spine of the entire book, while Dennis and Sheila and Eva and Mary and Holtzman are the limbs, branching off in every direction from this one central point. These stories are all connected through the reminiscing of times gone past after this main character has passed away, as told through the eyes of a narrator we barely know.

One passage that resonated with me was during the first chapter, when they were still sitting around the table reminiscing, and McDermott writes, "Billy had drunk himself to death. He had, at some point, 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."

I didn't realize, until going back and searching for the quote that first engaged me in this novel, how much this quote represents what the entire book is about. This quote, and this book, are about Billy, but also about the creation of this "fabric of affection" that he will later destroy. We need to first learn about his relationship with Dennis, or with Eva, in order for it to be more devastating when these relationships are destroyed. I think that this is part of what makes the book complex, and what makes it interesting for someone to read. We know from the very beginning that Billy is dead, and how he died, and the rest of his life is out of order, until, I predict, a whole picture of Billy is revealed.

I think the multiple dimensions and motivations in all the characters also contributes to entrancing the audience, since, everywhere you look, you can find something you relate to. Even though some readers may not have faced the struggles of having to bring relatives over from Ireland, or fighting in the trenches of World War II, they can still find themselves in Billy's anguish over losing Eva, Sheila's desperate craving for security, or Dennis' agonizing grief. The narrator, too, provides us with a way into the story. Just like us, she is an outsider looking in,

I look forward to seeing how this novel progresses, and hope that, now that Alice McDermott has entrapped us in "Charming Billy," the rest of the story can be unveiled.