CHARMING BILLY by Alice McDermott

Novel opens at Billy Lynch’s wake in a small Bronx bar in the late 1980’s.  The narrator, a young woman accompanying her father, holds the story together as sentimental myth making and the brutal truth of Billy’s alcoholism are told by Billy’s family and friends.

Irish American traditions and idiosyncrasies are vividly portrayed; I could hear the voices of my husband’s family, he, a first-generation Irish American.

Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1998, 243 p.