WHEN Alice McDermott packed her bag for New York and the National Book Award ceremony last November, she had a new dress but no thank-you speech. She was flattered that her novel Charming Billy had been nominated, but she figured she'd still be sitting after the winner was announced.
"To take my writing time and spend it writing an acceptance speech for something I was quite positive I wasn't going to get seemed totally ludicrous," recalls McDermott, who at the time was busy writing recommendations for her students at Johns Hopkins University.
"What are you going to do if you win?" her husband asked before she left their home in Bethesda, Maryland.
"Demand a recount," McDermott joked.
The odds-on favourite in the fiction category was Tom Wolfe's splashy book A Man in Full, which had just been published and was grabbing headlines. So when Charming Billy won, it was like a small art film beating the big Hollywood favourite at the Oscars.
The award, besides making McDermott $10,000 richer and creating new interest in her novel about an Irish-American alcoholic, prompted a flurry of profiles in major newspapers that cast the novelist as a suburban "soccer mom" who had hit the literary jackpot. But McDermott's talent has been no secret to the serious readers and critics who have followed her work since her 1982 debut, A Bigamist's Daughter. Her second novel, That Night in 1987, was also nominated for a National Book Award, but didn't win.
Charming Billy, McDermott's fourth novel, received admiring reviews when it was published early last year. Now, several months after the book award hoopla has died down, McDermott says: "it's great to be recognised, especially since the award comes from other writers". But she keeps things in perspective. "You have to be suspect of literary awards," she says. "One book is somehow better than every other book? Not really."
McDermott, 45, has a fresh-scrubbed, friendly face that betrays her Irish-Catholic roots. She looks like somebody who lives down the street and car-pools with the other mothers. McDermott and her husband, David Armstrong, a neuroscientist, have three children: Will, 13; Eames, 10; and Patrick, 5. If she has produced a new novel only every five or six years, it's because "life has intervened" in the form of new babies and several cross-country moves.
McDermott is heartened that a "quiet literary novel" is finding an audience, and she believes the reading public is hungry for serious fiction, even if the publishing industry spends more time and money promoting "crass commercial books".
"I don't consider myself an elite reader, and the people I know - who are smart people but not literary types - they know a good book, they appreciate good writing. It doesn't surprise me that hard books, literary books, quiet books, would have a readership. But I do think it's surprised the powers that be."
In the two decades she has been writing novels, McDermott has honed her craft, writing increasingly complex books about the hopes, dreams and bitter disappointments of Irish-American families.
Billy Lynch is the sad, soulful drunk at the heart of Charming Billy, and everybody loves him, despite his flaws. As the novel begins, his family and friends gather at a local bar and grill after his funeral to remember Billy, whose heart was broken by an Irish girl he once loved.
McDermott did not set out to write a "Time magazine type" book about alcoholism. But growing up Irish-Catholic on Long Island, she "knew the type". "You can't write about the Irish-American community and leave out drinking," McDermott says. She was intrigued by the stereotype of the "Irish lovable drunk" and wanted to find out "how you can write about a character who is so obviously a stereotype and still individualise him and make his life real," without romanticising him.
McDermott, who speaks often of the "complexity of our lives", becomes annoyed when anyone suggests that Billy was surrounded by "enablers". "I hate that word," she says. "They're friends and relatives. The people around him - and you can blame them for this as well as praise them - get something from Billy."
The nearly invisible narrator in Charming Billy is the grown daughter of Billy's cousin, Dennis. Dennis once told Billy a lie that has coloured his entire life. McDermott initially wanted to avoid a first-person narrator, because she had been reading a lot of fiction narrated by "women on the verge of a nervous breakdown". "It seemed to me there aren't many women narrators in fiction who are allowed to be wise and who see things clearly and who are not only talking about themselves," McDermott says. "So I decided I would like to hear from a woman narrator who is not the traditional woman narrator. Also, in real life, it's the woman's role to put together stories of family, to preserve the emotional life of the family."
All four of McDermott's grandparents emigrated from Ireland, met in New York and died young. Her third, highly-praised novel, At Weddings and Wakes (1992), was loosely based on her mother's family. "My mother's own mother died when she was three months old, and she was raised by her aunt, who she called her mother." In At Weddings and Wakes, a young mother takes her three small children back twice a week to the Brooklyn apartment where her mother (really her aunt) and her three unmarried sisters live in unhappily close quarters. The journey by bus and subway from Long Island to Brooklyn was one McDermott knew well as a child.
Her father worked as a business representative at Con Edison, like Billy and Dennis in Charming Billy. McDermott's parents didn't go to college, but "there was a great regard for reading" in their home. The rituals of Catholicism, of Irish storytelling, carried over when McDermott started to write.
She rejects the notion, which she sometimes hears, that she is a "death-obsessed writer". But she says: "If you're Irish-Catholic - emphasis on Catholic - you're taught to see the world in a certain way, to see life as brief and death as the thing to be prepared for."
Now, 17 years after that first novel, McDermott has developed a style that is completely her own, a multi-layered approach to storytelling that effortlessly shifts between points of view, between present and past.
"I don't think our memories work chronologically," McDermott says. "Writing fiction is an attempt to make more sense than life makes."
Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Charming Billy is published by Delta, $12.95; and will be published by Bloomsbury, on September 2nd, £15.99 in UK