![]() ![]() And she has used them to write a thoroughly original novel that embodies the same themes that animated her last two books, "That Night" (1987) and "At Weddings and Wakes" (1992) the irretrievable loss of innocence, the failures and triumphs of love and "that current of loss after loss that was adulthood."īilly's dream, we learn, is a heartbreakingly simple one He wants to marry his girlfriend, Eva, an Irish housemaid he met one bright summer day at the beach. ![]() ![]() She has simply used elements of his story. McDermott, however, has not written a tribute to or a postmodern reworking of Joyce. And as in "The Dead," we are left with a haunting sense of life's precariousness and durability, its relentless movement both forward and back into the past. As in "The Dead," we are reminded of the inexorable hold of time past over time present. The Irish Catholic world Alice McDermott writes about in her magical new novel, "Charming Billy," (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 280 pages $22) is located in Queens, not Dublin, but her book reads uncannily like a late-20th-century version of Joyce's story "The Dead."Īs in "The Dead," we are given a portrait of marriage shadowed by the ghost of a dead lover. ![]()
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