Prejudice

I found this scene puzzling — the one where the young people are in the bar and the bartender won't serve the Jew. Any theories on why McDermott included this?

Sex on the beach

What was your take on why Billy and Eva didn't have sex while Dennis and his Irish girl were doing it right and left? Was this more of Billy idealizing Eva, his foolish propensity to let the lovely Present give way to the dreamed-of Future?

(I think if Sebastian Barry had written this book, his hopeless-romantic Irishman at least would have gotten some insane glory out of the deal before the cold reality set in!)

Mama knows best?

(I'm home with my book, and I'm giddy looking through it).

Here's something I have to ask, especially based on Erin's just-get-over-it remarks about romantics (hehe). Look at this description of Dennis' mother. What do you think McDermott intended by including a character like this (someone who is regarded as a "sage" in the family and who is seemingly at the other end of the spectrum from Billy)?

She was a Geiger counter for insincerity, phoniness, half-truths. She could dismantle a pose with a glance and deflate the most romantic notion with a single word. She had no patience for poetry, Broadway musicals, presidential politics, or the pomp of her religion — although my father, his father's son, loved these things in direct proportion to her disdain — and she sought truth so single-mindedly that under her steady gaze exaggeration, self-delusion, bravado simply dried up and blew away, as did hope, nonsense, and any ungrounded giddiness.

Her philosophy of life seemed to be to get to the bottom of things, the plain, unadorned, mostly concrete and and colorless bottom of things, and from there to seek to swat away any passing fancy that might cloud the hard-won clarity of her vision.

And is Dennis intended as a sort of happy medium between his mother's no-nonsense view and Billy's romanticized one?

Chicken or egg?

I felt that Billy's alcoholism was intimately related to his ordeal with Eva, but then there's also the feeling that alcoholism was common in that community/family, that it was almost fate. Did you think Eva merely exacerbated a strong predisposition or did the sadness really drive him to drink?

Favorite scene

Did you have a favorite scene?

(I really liked the scene near the end where the narrator and her dad took the relative — was it Dan Lynch? I don't have my book with me — back to his apartment and stayed to have a drink with him and talk about Billy. I thought it was kind of a nice bookend to the funeral lunch at the beginning.)

Eva

Did you have any anger toward Eva at any point, or were you able to easily accept that her actions were just the folly of youth?

The lie

How did you feel about Dennis' lie to Billy? If he had just told him the truth from the beginning, do you think there would have been a different outcome for Billy?

What is love?

Why do you think Dennis married Maeve in the end?

Billy

Did you like Billy? Did you find him more heroic or pathetic?

The narrator

I thought the choice of narrator was really interesting in this book — someone who was at some distance from the heart of the story but near enough to have it told to her from someone closely involved and then to retell it. What did you think of this?

Here's what McDermott herself said about her narrative choice in an interview she did after the novel won the National Book Award in 1998.

INTERVIEWER: And the book is almost an elegy, the voice that one of the judges referred to that tells the story, which is a young woman, actually, has a kind of delicate elegiac tone. How did you decide to do that, to make her the storyteller?

ALICE McDERMOTT: Do you know I resisted that voice, that first person narrative, but it seemed to me if you're telling a story about faith, you're also telling a story about telling stories, the things that we believe in — our stories that we hear and are told. And so it seemed to me that the entire novel needed to be told to someone, and that was where - the inevitability of that first person voice telling a story that's not necessarily her own, but putting together, as women do, the various stories in her family and making something of it.

Here's the whole interview.

"Charming Billy"

To begin with, what was your initial impression of this novel? Did you like it?

Bump

Sorry it's been a while -- hopefully you'll still remember this story!

What did you think of this story? Is this the ending you might have envisioned for Ms. Hempel?

And what's the deal with Jonathan Hamish again? There seemed to be an almost romantic interest going on, didn't there?