Maeve sat in front of this window, at the head of the table. She wore a navy-blue dress with long, slim sleeves and a round neckline, and anyone in the room who had not thought it earlier thought now--perhaps inspired by the perfect simplicity of what she wore--that there was a kind of beauty in her ordinary looks, in her plainness. Or, if they didn't think to call it beauty, they said courage--more appropriate to the occasion and the day--not meaning necessarily her new-widow's courage (with its attendant new-widow's cliches: bearing up, holding on, doing well), but the courage to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nun's and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band and a small pearl ring for adornment.
Of course, they'd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, or--most likely--all but my father), living with Billy as she did; but now, seeing her at the head of the table, Billy gone (there would be time enough throughout the afternoon to say it's unbelievable still), her courage, or her beauty, however they chose to refer to it, became something new--which made something new, in turn, of what they might say about Billy's life. Because if she was beautiful, then the story of his life, or the story they would begin to re-create for him this afternoon, would have to take another turn.
-The Alice McDermott sentence! The subclauses, the parenthetical asides. Don't try this at home. When McDermott describes "beauty in plainness," she is giving us a mission statement. Yes, she's talking about Maeve, but she's also talking about her own literary work: She wants to find beauty, and great power, in the stories of apparently "ho hum" people. No kings or presidents here. "Beauty in plainness." A Catholic, at least on one level, McDermott is drawn to mystery and to paradox. It's a mystery that Jesus is both God and Man. It's a mystery that Mary had an immaculate conception. It's a mystery, in "Charming Billy," that Maeve was able to find this perfect pub--"like something from a Synge play"--in a section of the Bronx known to many. No one else has ever found this pub. It's a mystery, also, that Maeve can be both beautiful and plain.
-McDermott's attention to rhythm makes you think of a singing bard. She has a treasure trove of "new-widow's cliches," and they all start with a stressed syllable and feature an unstressed syllable in the middle: "bearing up, holding on, doing well." The monotonousness of the rhythm seems to reproduce the sense of monotonousness you might experience at an actual wake--part-comforting, part-tiresome. And McDermott has an interest in the pageantry of this kind of occasion: A cliche has a purpose, and we'd be sorry if we didn't all get to say (blandly), "It's unbelievable still that Billy is dead."
-Paradox: You can derive beauty simply from having the chutzpah to "look out at life from a face as plain as butter." (And you might wonder if McDermott is describing herself when she alludes to hair cut short as a nun's--with the double indignity of "fading" brown and a little gray-to-add-a-dimming-effect. This obsessive level of detail--typical of McDermott's work--seems to make the sensory world "holy.")
-"Charming Billy" is all about the act of narration. On one level, there's a fairly simple (and even well-worn) plot: A charismatic, maddening alcoholic drinks himself to death. That's the big transgression, the juice for the engine, like something out of "The Lost Weekend." But then there's something else happening: McDermott wants to think about who does the telling, and when, and about how accidents of personality and fate alter the story, shape the "received wisdom."
-Little bombs go off. We didn't know until midway through a mid-chapter paragraph that the narrator speaking to us is "I" (as opposed to an omniscient narrator). Then we wonder about the reference to Synge: Is this to suggest that the speaker, from a younger generation than Billy's, also has more education than the graying people around her? How does overlooking one detail help to change everything? If Maeve was beautiful all along, and if her beauty didn't just derive from the dignified struggle of tending to an alcoholic, then can we say we ever really knew Maeve? And if we didn't know Maeve, can we say we ever knew Billy? That's the game McDermott is playing here. We can never apprehend the full truth. We are always seeing things as if "looking through a glass, darkly." And if we never get to the essential core of things, then there are always new and newly-complex stories to tell. And--as McDermott suggests--the act of editing, the struggle to refine one's stories, is, actually, a story in and of itself.
P.S. People think that "immaculate conception" describes Mary's plopping out the baby Jesus. But that's wrong. The idea is that *Mary herself* had to be born free of original sin. She had to have that special attribute, if she was going to do all the wacky work God assigned to her later in life. *That* is the immaculate conception.
P.P.S. How many other contemporary writers pay such close attention to sentence structure? Notice the parallelism: "Pale, downy" with "bland blue" with "faded brown." Two by two by two. "The wedding band and the pearl ring." "The powder and the lipstick." I think of animal couples wandering off to find a spot on Noah's ark.
Of course, they'd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, or--most likely--all but my father), living with Billy as she did; but now, seeing her at the head of the table, Billy gone (there would be time enough throughout the afternoon to say it's unbelievable still), her courage, or her beauty, however they chose to refer to it, became something new--which made something new, in turn, of what they might say about Billy's life. Because if she was beautiful, then the story of his life, or the story they would begin to re-create for him this afternoon, would have to take another turn.
-The Alice McDermott sentence! The subclauses, the parenthetical asides. Don't try this at home. When McDermott describes "beauty in plainness," she is giving us a mission statement. Yes, she's talking about Maeve, but she's also talking about her own literary work: She wants to find beauty, and great power, in the stories of apparently "ho hum" people. No kings or presidents here. "Beauty in plainness." A Catholic, at least on one level, McDermott is drawn to mystery and to paradox. It's a mystery that Jesus is both God and Man. It's a mystery that Mary had an immaculate conception. It's a mystery, in "Charming Billy," that Maeve was able to find this perfect pub--"like something from a Synge play"--in a section of the Bronx known to many. No one else has ever found this pub. It's a mystery, also, that Maeve can be both beautiful and plain.
-McDermott's attention to rhythm makes you think of a singing bard. She has a treasure trove of "new-widow's cliches," and they all start with a stressed syllable and feature an unstressed syllable in the middle: "bearing up, holding on, doing well." The monotonousness of the rhythm seems to reproduce the sense of monotonousness you might experience at an actual wake--part-comforting, part-tiresome. And McDermott has an interest in the pageantry of this kind of occasion: A cliche has a purpose, and we'd be sorry if we didn't all get to say (blandly), "It's unbelievable still that Billy is dead."
-Paradox: You can derive beauty simply from having the chutzpah to "look out at life from a face as plain as butter." (And you might wonder if McDermott is describing herself when she alludes to hair cut short as a nun's--with the double indignity of "fading" brown and a little gray-to-add-a-dimming-effect. This obsessive level of detail--typical of McDermott's work--seems to make the sensory world "holy.")
-"Charming Billy" is all about the act of narration. On one level, there's a fairly simple (and even well-worn) plot: A charismatic, maddening alcoholic drinks himself to death. That's the big transgression, the juice for the engine, like something out of "The Lost Weekend." But then there's something else happening: McDermott wants to think about who does the telling, and when, and about how accidents of personality and fate alter the story, shape the "received wisdom."
-Little bombs go off. We didn't know until midway through a mid-chapter paragraph that the narrator speaking to us is "I" (as opposed to an omniscient narrator). Then we wonder about the reference to Synge: Is this to suggest that the speaker, from a younger generation than Billy's, also has more education than the graying people around her? How does overlooking one detail help to change everything? If Maeve was beautiful all along, and if her beauty didn't just derive from the dignified struggle of tending to an alcoholic, then can we say we ever really knew Maeve? And if we didn't know Maeve, can we say we ever knew Billy? That's the game McDermott is playing here. We can never apprehend the full truth. We are always seeing things as if "looking through a glass, darkly." And if we never get to the essential core of things, then there are always new and newly-complex stories to tell. And--as McDermott suggests--the act of editing, the struggle to refine one's stories, is, actually, a story in and of itself.
P.S. People think that "immaculate conception" describes Mary's plopping out the baby Jesus. But that's wrong. The idea is that *Mary herself* had to be born free of original sin. She had to have that special attribute, if she was going to do all the wacky work God assigned to her later in life. *That* is the immaculate conception.
P.P.S. How many other contemporary writers pay such close attention to sentence structure? Notice the parallelism: "Pale, downy" with "bland blue" with "faded brown." Two by two by two. "The wedding band and the pearl ring." "The powder and the lipstick." I think of animal couples wandering off to find a spot on Noah's ark.
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