Word: mcdermott
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Billy Lynch, a lovely, funny man (a hopeless, lifelong drunk), is dead in middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes...
...missing the irony of the drinks in their hands and the drink that had killed him, but redeeming, perhaps, the pleasure of a drink or two, on a sad, wet afternoon, in the company of old friends, from the miserable thing that a drink had become in his life." McDermott goes on, deadly accurate: "The fruit salad was canned but served with a little scoop of lime sherbet, which was refreshing, everyone agreed...
...another man and used Billy's money to buy a gas station. This sad affair, which reads like a parody verse of Danny Boy, doesn't work as a reason for Billy's drinking. He was an alcoholic before meeting Eva, and his parched life and shabby death--and McDermott's fine novel--would have been the same had she never existed...
...small, scrappy law firm, ABC's The Practice is a very entertaining melodrama, even if it breaks no new ground. The cast is good, especially Michael Badalucco as a struggling personal-injury lawyer, and the scripts are smartly plotted, with some humor thrown in too. As our hero, Dylan McDermott manages not only to have good hair but also to seem genuinely savvy and charismatic...
...know if I want to be on the theory or experimental end," McDermott said. "But I definitely want to be a professor of neuroscience...