Charming Billy
A Novel

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion...Those of us who clai......more

I confess, I have OWNED this book for a couple of years. I started it twice, thinking an award-winning book should surely win me, but both times set it aside. But after reading McDermott's "After This" recently, I picked up "Charming Billy" again. I can only think that the books we respond to are in......more

Charming Billy is more sculpture than novel. The characters don’t so much develop as exist like creatures suspended in amber, unyielding to the chaos of time, love, and grief. Unlike traditional stories chronicling how characters react to stimuli, studies in personal evolution, this book illustrates......more

Beloved Billy has died in his cups and we take a soulful amble through his life and his impact on the people in it as seen through the narrative of his best friend's daughter. Beautifully told and heartfelt. 3 1/2 stars.......more

This was a beautiful novel with some top-notch prose. Not one word in this novel was pointless. This book was superbly written and a delight to read. It's a short read too. It's longer than Gatsby, but not by much. The story starts at the end, after the funeral, and moves back in time revealing Bill......more