The Irish Unveiled--Again

Alice McDermott has caught one of the aspects of Irish-American life that I have always known about but could never put my finger on. The drunken uncles of my Irish friends' families just seemed to go with the territory on the Southwest side of Chicago in the fifties. And this tale lifts a curtain into that mystery.

The tale is told by charming Billy's goddaughter and begins after Billy's funeral. The main memory about Billy and the excuse given for his drunkenness throughout life is revealed in the first chapter--an old love affair where the girl dies young. Billy has been in mourning--and drunk--for nearly forty years over the loss of the girl. He drank and mourned till the day he died (God rest his soul) of cirrosis of the liver..

This is all well and good and such a sad, romantic tale to tell at an Irish funeral where each character has some long-suffering sadness filling his or her own heart. And each Bridie and Danny Boy delights in the chance to indulge in the melancholy, soppy sentimental philosophizing about life that is done so well at an Irish funeral. McDermott catches the scene and the sentiments so perfectly including the saintly Altar Guild ladies who send off the corpse with a mumbled rosary chorus at the wake and silently serve the chocolate cake at the house. Then the revered priest arrives as if he were Christ himself and is the only one who can offer the widow true solace.

But the sad tale of Billy's drunkenness turns out to be a lie--the story that Billy's best friend, our narrator's father, told to save him the sorrow. The truth is that the girl went back to Ireland and dumped Billy. She stole the money that he'd sent over and married the boy next door.

Told in flashbacks, the story is the revelation of the truth, the busting up of the sentimentality and excuses that the characters so want to believe are real. The hazy, nostalgic description of the summer house where Billy met "The Irish Girl" is right out of an Irish Ballad and is contrasted with the narrator's version of how she met her own husband at the same house in a later decade. All the bubbles are burst, the secrets revealed, the lies undone.

But the real does not move us and the tale does. It is the charm of Billy and the story of his one true love that leave us longing for that old sentimental feeling. The way it could have been or the way we wanted it to be. The belief in a love beyond the pale. And the faith that it's all in the plan of a good and loving God who watches over us and rewards us for our sad endurance of this not-so-perfect world. McDermott brings it all together in this tour-de-force of an Irish novel.

And, now, finally, I begin to understand what all the secret sadness of those old drunken Irish uncles was all about. It is, as McDermott writes at the novel's close "As if ...what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all."
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