fiction of faith, fiction of belief
an appreciation of Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy"
[image: Irish Famine Memorial, Washington St., Boston, MA, by Bob Linsdell, Creative Commons 3.0]
Heads up: this is a bit of a long read. Maybe save for later, if pressed for time now.
Faith—the way Catholics mean it, as an infused virtue of soul—is a gift from above. But belief is a gift from below. Faith is divine; belief is human. To have faith we must open ourselves to that which transcends us. But to believe we must be able to trust: if not in our elders, then at least in our peers, our environments, our own senses. If we cannot do this, belief breaks. And without the ability to believe, faith falters.
Another way to say this: Faith is vertical, belief horizontal, in orientation. Without a substrate of credible belief, grounded in trust, the tree of faith cannot establish firm enough roots in the soil to support its growth.
For we are dependent, contingent creatures. But we like to try to forget this. At least, I do. (And yet here I have been all this time, making so many fideistic assertions about the nature of faith and belief: and yet how are you to trust that the maker of these assertions has any knowledge whereof she speaks?)
But I am not inviting you to listen to me so much as I’m inviting you to listen to Alice McDermott, who in her debut novel Charming Billy unfolds the particular beauty and pain of a certain kind of Irish Catholic American family, which may yet have its resonances within families of other origin too. This peculiar flavor of beauty and pain arises whenever you can never really know whether the family story around which your whole life was built is the story that tracks to strictly measurable, historically verifiable reality—or whether it was simply the story you had to believe to survive, whether it was capital-T True or not. Pinned down by this, you must then wrestle with the obvious metaphysical trust-implications of such an uncertainty: If I cannot even believe what some of these people tell me about themselves, others, the world we all inhabit—how can I be so sure I should believe what they want to tell me about God?
It isn’t spoiling plot to give you the shape of the novel’s core conflict, whose nature McDermott freely unfolds in the opening scene—set during a post-funeral banquet for the eponymous Billy, who died fervently believing that he was going to meet his long-lost Irish love Eva in Heaven. Yet all along, not only the all-beholding eye of God but also the keen eyes of Billy’s relatives have known that Eva never died at all. She is still alive in Clonmel, the widow of a gas-station attendant. The story of Eva’s death was always a lie—concocted by Billy’s cousin Dennis to free himself from an idyllic but callow engagement to Eva’s sister Mary. The two couples met one summer on Long Island—the women just visitors to family members in the immigrant community; the men already established and earning well in the city, yet therefore vulnerable to being used for their money. Driven by fury and pity when he discovers Eva does not love Billy nor has she really ever meant to marry him, Dennis desires to break ties with Eva’s whole family. So he ends his engagement and lies to Billy about Eva, who in reality has already used Billy’s money to buy the gas station; both men then meet new women and start new lives. Or so they think.
In reality, Billy’s grief over Eva’s supposed death starts him down the alcoholic downward spiral that, decades later, kills him. So does this make Dennis a villain? After all, he watches his cousin commit a slow suicide by bottle, the whole time holding the one piece of information that might make him stop. Dennis deals ever so patiently night after night with vomit-stained, reeling Billy and his desperately codependent American wife Maeve, but does not act to break the pattern. Is Dennis loyal and steadfast, or is he a toxic enabler, or could he somehow be both?
What about Billy? Is he the picture of credulous faith, or merely of willing self-delusion? Is he like his other cousin Dan, whose orthodoxy is less a matter of deeply thought-out conviction than of poll-parrot echolalia: or is he a type of compromised, weak, yet all the same inspired mystic? The narrative openly calls into question the whole epistemic basis of Billy’s religious impulse, even as it intoxicates us with the incense-scent of that same impulse:
Dark, sparkling, sprinkled with moments when the sound and smell and sight of the place, the taste at the back of his throat, transported him, however briefly, to a summer night long ago when he was young and life was all promise and she was there to turn to, to drink in, this was also the world where his faith met him, became actual, no longer as mere promise or possibility but as inevitable and true. No less than the cathedrals and churches and synagogues scattered through the city that had once sustained and amazed him, now the various bars he stopped into … reminded him that what he sought, what he longed for, was universal and constant…. And in each of them, the force of his faith, of his Church, a force he could only glimpse briefly while sober—maybe for a second or two after Communion when he knelt and bowed his head, or for that brief instant when he pushed aside the heavy curtain and stepped into the dark confessional, or in the first rising scent of the incense at Benediction—became clear and steady and as fully true as the vivid past or the as-yet-unseen but inevitable future….
It should not escape our notice that reverence is, for Billy, most fully and most consistently attainable at the bottom of a glass. “Drunk, when Billy turned his eyes to heaven, heaven was there….” (emphasis mine). Only under the influence of a mind-distorting substance was he able to see “the substance of things hoped for.” Billy’s dependence on drink for the adjustment of his eyesight, for “compensation” (which he calls “redemption,” which feels like a misnomer), tweaks O’Connor’s fabled dictum about doctrine as an aid to clarity. Whiskey, at a far remove from the wine of Cana, blinds Billy rather than opening his eyes. Whatever blurs and doubles your vision should at least be suspected, if only “briefly while sober,” of helping you delude yourself about what is really there.
No: not even Billy’s charm can strip addiction of its nature, defined by the placement of self-regarding desire above another’s legitimate claim. Billy can be trusted only so far as to be consistent. Unless and until he seeks change of his own will, he will continue to place self above others, desire above need. By leading with Billy’s funeral, McDermott at least spares the reader the tension of wondering whether Billy will someday change. No: not only that, no one around him will ever quite give him the needed impetus.
Because by now the whole family is as addicted to its own lie as Billy is to his bar visits. The family myth built up to aid survival in the face of indifferent or hostile socioeconomic forces: the lie that, because it preserves the ego, makes itself felt as more palatable than the truth: lies like these leach into the lifeblood of families marred by the consequences of addiction. But as the liar knows best, “it’s hard to be a liar and a believer at the same time.”
So the web of self-contradiction and self-defeat meshes into a holding pattern. And a holding pattern is just that: it holds you. And when you feel that the alternative is freefall, you’ll go on just as you are. Even if it kills you. Especially if it kills you.
There’s a looping, maddening circularity here, an insularity of self-reference more tightly wound than any Celtic knot. What could break the pattern? Only an incursion from somewhere outside: but this incursion is what the uprooted, unstable family fears most. This is why it circles its wagons so tightly, bristles its defenses outward so ferociously. This is why the only people it allows to hurt each other are … each other. This is why it must maintain its illusion of always only ever representing a lacquered, polished pride—such as Fintan O’Toole describes seeing in his parents’ wedding photographs at the opening of We Don’t Know Ourselves:
… emblems of a great continuity, of a seriousness and respectability forged over generations of struggle against squalor and despair, against poverty and violence … [whose] adamant dignity sparkles like a diamond hard-won from the dirt.
Trapped within this iron curtain of lace-curtained defensiveness against what isn’t even attacking you, is it still possible to feel, to know, to access truth? An incredibly poignant, delicately balanced scene about two-thirds of the way through Charming Billy speaks to this mystery.
At Maeve’s home after Billy’s funeral, the family atmosphere is quickly devolving. Two dozen highly sensitive Irish souls—outwardly well groomed, inwardly wet cats, and shepherded together all day—have more than begun to fray at the seams. The grieving widow is flirting with total breakdown when a visiting Monsignor appears, with his “professional” handling of human nature, to rescue Maeve from her well-meaning relatives’ inept efforts to shore up her “courage” (which itself has perhaps been all along just another exquisite social lie). The gathered children, most of whom are committed skeptics, see this priest in his role not so much as minister of God’s grace but as consummate professional. He is the skilled closing pitcher who saves the baseball game, the top-flight lawyer who clinches the argument. As such, Monsignor performs his work expertly. Unlike other professionals’, his is an expertise in the human heart itself, brought to bear by means of the gentle, patient, humane acts that fill most of the time of his visit—and most of the space that visit receives on the page. But midway through his sojourn at Maeve’s, we learn that an unironic, single-entendre Faith (bound up with, yet transcending, belief) underlies and breathes life into these acts. Monsignor’s expertise, it turns out, stems not merely from a long and nearly clinical experience of dealing with grieving persons but from his inner, felt sense of knowledge—gained through “utter faith”—that “death was not what we believed it to be tonight, not at all… Only he understood that death was nothing that it seemed to be, to us, tonight.”
Believers, driven by faith and hope, confidently expect the resurrection of the body—a faith rooted, yes, in human “belief,” but blooming upward from such belief in a way inexplicable by the root alone. Monsignor’s tripartite confession of faith in the living Christ and the resurrection of the body—brought as it is here into the suffocating hothouse atmosphere of family grief, brought as a familiar yet alien presence, a possible locus of new life—marks among other things a high point of development in the contemporary Catholic novel. Not only is uncritical acknowledgment of a substantive faith taken seriously and allowed space on the page, it is given priority of place. Monsignor proposes belief to Maeve without primary regard to, but also without disregard to, that belief’s this-worldly healing powers or emotional benefits. Though he knows his words may heal, he is not behaving here as a moralistic therapeutic deist. He does not hold out the promise of belief’s necessarily transforming effects on Maeve’s life so much as he refers to his own certainty of the truth of its content. At the same time, yes, he is certainly exercising control over a tenuous situation through the power of his language—yet for him that power is ultimately referenced to a Source that resides representationally inside but also historically and sacramentally outside himself: the veracity of Christ’s resurrection, the whole reason for believing in the resurrection of the dead. Even while Maeve’s will to accept and adopt this point of reference is noticeably at war with the undertow of her grief and the shadow of her possible doubt, the narration gives full weight and fine balance to all of the forces at play. Most of all, McDermott reveals how that balance then gives true and immediate relief to Maeve’s strained body and pained mind, not in some hoped-for distant future but in this moment, now. It’s an extraordinarily well rendered, and beautifully tender, moment: deep feeling, but without a sliver of sentimentality.
This effect can be achieved partially because the scene’s supernaturalism is further tempered and softened by its filtering through the consciousness of the tale’s unnamed narrator, Dennis’s daughter. What the reader most needs to understand about this narrator is the stark contrast she embodies between her own sun-dazzled, blade-sharp way of seeing and being in the world and her family’s shaded, shadowed, lace-curtain-enmeshed ways. She sees unquestioning, guilt-ridden faith as characteristic of her parents’ generation and unblinkered, guilt-free agnosticism as characteristic of her own. This vision is complicated by Dennis’s own dark night of faith during the time of Billy’s death and funeral, and even further complicated when Dennis later tells his daughter that his faith has now returned. But he does so with his back turned to her, successfully carrying across a subtle implication that among the things whose veracity we cannot ever adequately measure, she perhaps counts the reliability of self-reporting by people of faith regarding that same faith. Does this implication compromise the quality or sincerity of Monsignor’s witness in the earlier scene? Because of the exquisite relief of McDermott’s art, it doesn’t have to. What you see, in this novel, is dependent upon the angle from which you look at it: where shadow falls, where light. At the same time, no matter where you stand, there is more to be seen than can be found from your fixed viewpoint—which, you are constantly reminded, is only momentarily and impermanently fixed. What McDermott grants you through all these subtle shiftings of balance and weight, light and shade, is the ability, the liberty, to move.
Charming Billy ends on a note of determined, even principled, ambiguity. The stunning last line, which I will not spoil for you, vibrates like a wineglass tapped for a toast when we all know the person we’re celebrating was tragically flawed. This work is, so richly, at once a fiction of faith—one that examines the concrete, objective things of experience in a radiance that ultimately falls upon them from outside and above them—and a novel of belief—one that investigates the shifting nature of subjective truth and of our relationship to it and to each other. The novel celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in print this year. If you don’t know it well already, I hope you are so lucky as to find time to read it before 2023 ends.