Once, as I Read, the Real World Ceded

On Re-Reading Alice McDermott

“Remembering,” Beth Kephart Collage with Acrylics and Thread

Now when I go shopping in my own bookshelves, I feel a terrible melancholy for the stories as I first found them, the authors as I first loved them, the ways in which I did not suffer as I now suffer the imperious, rolling, threatening thunder of the world beyond the cracked spine and the smoothed page and the black immaculate ink. The ways in which I, with such naive ease, buffered my own abetted imagination and, in undisturbed solitude, sunk in.

As if the world of the book were the world.

How innocent was I. How capable of steeping in and ceding to passages like this from Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, wishing the wish of the fictive moment: 

But the child was light as feather in his hands and the lightness took his breath away. The baby wore a seersucker sun suit that left his tiny arms and shoulders bare, and Billy covered these with a cupped palm as he rested the child against his chest. The flesh was as sweetly warm as if the hand of God had just formed it. He blew softly across the child’s downy hair and closed his eyes to say, “Now, now, little fellow. Now now.”

I first read Charming Billy in 1998. I read it weeks before I sat beside McDermott during the National Book Awards gala—her book (deservedly) nominated for fiction, my book (mysteriously) nominated for nonfiction. She was, in person, as fine as her prose, as graced, and beside her, because of her, because of how I believed in her, I was graced, and now, all these years later, reading this novel again, loving this novel again, loving McDermott as I will always love McDermott, I am returned not just to the story of Billy’s broken heart but to that lost era when the anxious hum of the world beyond did not press so inexorably in.