Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 25, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Opening at a funeral luncheon in the Bronx in 1982, ``Charming Billy'' follows brilliantly this arc of memory and desire. In what is perhaps partial homage to Joyce's ``The Dead,'' the novel renders a tragedy from long ago through the stories of the witnesses left behind -- their own truths muddied by time and private agendas, the real story an amalgam of sentiment and regret. In its elegiac retrospective of the life of Billy Lynch -- a marvelous, frustrating, heartbroken alcoholic who brought love to everyone he touched and trouble to most of them -- ``Charming Billy'' manages a poetic longing as fine as anything Billy himself could manage on his better days.

While the story spans three generations of Irish-Americans in Queens, from the Second World War to the present, that descriptor makes the novel sound more epic than the carefully selective tale it is. From its first scene at that grief- and trivia-laden table in the Bronx, we know that Billy died drunk after decades of efforts to give up the bottle; we know, too, that he left a grieving, courageous wife, Maeve, whose perceived plainness only underscored her bravery. We know that Dennis, the close-as-brothers cousin to Billy and father to the novel's narrator, tried desperately to save the man he so loved, helping Maeve instead when Billy refused his aid. And we know that Billy's corpse -- bloated and ravaged by drink -- was nearly unrecognizable when Dennis was called to identify the body. It is testament to McDermott's shimmering and layered narrative that all these dark facts recede through the journey of Billy's story: Within a few pages he is simply young Billy Lynch again, home from the war and in love with a girl on the beach -- ``the Irish girl,'' as his mourners recall her -- and ready to inhabit the hopes of a lifetime.

For Maeve found Billy on the rebound, when he was already stunned with grief over the death of his fiance, Eva, who had returned to Ireland after their summer romance to prepare for their wedding. This was the official version of Eva-and-Billy, anyway, the one still being retailed and clucked over at the time of his death. The less tragic but more awful truth is one Dennis has guarded closely for three decades: Eva jilted Billy, took his money, and then married her Irish sweetheart. Having learned of her deceit from her sister, Dennis, in a well-intentioned act of colossal hubris, invented her death, believing that pneumonia at 25 would be a preferable outcome to cruel betrayal.

For two decades Dennis carried the lie, watching as Billy reeled from the story of Eva's death, then married Maeve; watching as his cousin tried to stanch the wounds of alcoholism with the promises of religious faith. We learn about this tender and monstrous deception in the first 30 pages, and it sets the tone for everything that will follow: the poignance of unrequited love, the painful legacies of family loyalty, and the chilling vagaries of what we euphemistically call destiny -- which is really just the way a life turns out.

And yet there is little bitterness or remorse among the castabouts of ``Charming Billy''; instead there is mercy, and not a little charity, and what you might call the interpretive gifts of the Irish. ``Isn't enough as good as a feast?'' Dennis's mother used to ask, and the question hovers throughout the novel -- over the marriages made, the commitments kept, the paths taken by fate or whimsy or both. Strolling seamlessly through a series of lives linked by Billy Lynch, McDermott's narrative takes us to Long Island in the postwar years, when East Hampton was a train station rather than a state of mind; to the bakeries and streetcars and shoe stores of Brooklyn and Queens, when a man could have the same job and the same neighbors for 30 years. ``The story went, . . .'' begins the narrator, time and again, and so the story goes in ``Charming Billy'': thrusting itself forward through time and over hurdles, as active as any life force and hellbent on revelation.

There are unforgettable cameos through the tales surrounding Billy's life: Dennis's headstrong mother, who married well twice but never for love; an Irish bartender who, the war just over, refused to serve Jews; a girl in France who sent a a four-word message to her fiance at the front: ``I am still here.'' Those passionate words provide a kind of half-remembered litany through the losses and inch-by-inch victories of ``Charming Billy,'' and they speak, finally, to some sustenance of being that is stronger even than Billy's death. Stronger than the promises made by the priest to Maeve, stronger than the fabric of Dennis's kind-hearted lie: the staying power of love and memory, even when the story they tell is a blend of myth and veiled desire.

``Charming Billy'' is a remarkable and beautifully told novel, with overlays of prose and insight that are simply luminescent. Its emotional aftermath has the same feel as Graham Swift's ``Last Orders,'' which also delivered a life through the memories surrounding a death. And yet the color of this novel is distinctly, entirely, its own: Muted by the wash of loss that follows you to the grave, uplifted by the ever-present starlight -- the promise of love, the sweetness of memory -- that lingers, half-concealed, in every corner of your days.