Alice McDermott's classroom at Johns Hopkins University was empty yesterday. She was in New York, at bookstores reading from her novel, "Charming Billy." Tonight in the Big Apple, she'll join other authors who will be listening for their names when judges announce the winner of this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Since Tom Wolfe's new book, "A Man in Full," was nominated, the race is not neck-and-neck, McDermott didn't write an acceptance speech and, instead of being tense, she plans to enjoy it. Just thinking that she'll finally get to meet John Updike, and in such circumstances, makes her giggle.

Especially since Alice McDermott is a reluctant author.

If she could be comfortable with any other job, one that would not leave her feeling depressed or foolish, she would not write -- it is too hard.

But write she must, and in spite of her angst, she has written four novels, all acclaimed. Two were Pulitzer finalists -- the best seller "At Weddings and Wakes" (1992) and "That Night" (1987) -- and two were National Book Award finalists -- "That Night" and "Charming Billy." Her first novel, "A Bigamist's Daughter," was published in 1982.

McDermott, 44, who now lives in Bethesda, became a writer by default. If anything bothered her, McDermott's mother told her back when she was growing up on Long Island, she should write it down and throw it away -- rather than say something she might later regret. A form of therapy.

By college, her career was sewn up: "I have bad news," a professor told her after reading her first novel, "you are a writer." He called a friend starting out in book editing -- Jonathan Galassi, now the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- to tell him about McDermott.

While he called, the reluctant writer went to the library and listened over and over again to William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself -- that alone makes good fiction and alone is worth the agony and the sweat, he said.

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past," Faulkner said.

She could be a writer, she realized, without having to say, "I am going to be the next Virginia Woolf."

It was a big step for the daughter of first-generation Irish-American parents, literate but not college-educated, who expected her to be a secretary. McDermott's old neighborhood was such that one childhood friend, after congratulating her about the National Book Award nomination recently, offered to "mess up a few faces" if it would help her win.

McDermott's subject is the life of the soul. She doesn't get at it by devising plots but by observing lives, particularly third-generation Irish-American families in the suburbs.

McDermott never intended to be a writer of Irish-American life -- that is simply the material at hand. But she does write in the tradition of Irish writers, Joyce among them, who examine past and present, love and loss, regret and its hold on life. Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times review of "Charming Billy" in January, wrote that McDermott had invented a thoroughly original 20th-century version of Joyce's "The Dead."

In McDermott's hands, the reader can smell the Sunday roast beef and see the cook douse the overcooked Brussels sprouts with butter and salt. "Less plotted than painted," a reviewer in Commonweal wrote of "Charming Billy."

In truth, her plots are intricate and sometimes require a map. And it is probably Vladimir Nabokov she more consciously turns to and admires, though James Joyce was an early influence, she says.

'An innovative writer'

Her latest novel unfolds at the funeral of Billy Lynch in Queens and is narrated by his young niece. Billy was a drunk, a stereotype that did not interest McDermott at first but somehow makes a perfect subject for her theme of love and loss and redemption. Everybody knows the tragedy that befell him 30 years earlier: His true love, an Irish governess to whom he sent money from his extra job for years, died in Ireland of pneumonia.

But what is revealed at the funeral is that Billy's love never died -- she had married another man and used Billy's money to open a gas station. The narrator's father, Billy's cousin, had made up the death story to shelter Billy. Eventually Billy had learned the truth, when he went to Ireland to visit her grave.

Amid the failure of love, the losses, the triumphs, one thing is clear: The family is held together at such rituals as Sunday dinner, and by the sense of duty and acts of kindness cousin did for cousin.

"She is an innovative writer, but all in the service of getting to the heart of complex emotions that people respond to," says Galassi, her longtime editor. Readers "see their own reflection of how life is. It's a tragic sense. Ultimately her books are about the difficulty of loss and loving, and the solace comes in recognizing those things fully and truthfully."

It is the idea of finding truth that McDermott tries to impart to her class at Johns Hopkins.

Once a week, on Tuesdays, McDermott leads a three-hour writing seminar in the bell tower of Gilman Hall. It's a good group, 12 students, all anxious to get published. Teaching reminds her of the struggle facing every writer, established or novice, at the beginning of every story.

"I see students groping after the truth. It's wonderful," she says. "They are not all thinking, 'I am going to sell it to the movies.' They are writing because they have to -- that's what you do when you are a writer."

To those struggling over raw canvases, she offers compassion.

Two weeks ago, after reading a student's story about a son searching for his inattentive father, McDermott commented that the story delivered too much plot too soon, diluting the focus on emotion. It "doesn't open the door. It closes the door. ..."

The student, Mark Friedman, explained that he intended to turn the story into a novel in which the father is revealed as a spy. He wanted something big, a complicated plot.

Isn't it a big enough plot that the father is so horrible? McDermott asked. "The moral choice is implicit here: Does he forgive him or not?"

"There has to be some kind of device, or activity or event here," the author protested.

"The device is to shadow his father," McDermott replied. "To make him a spy you need a freight train of information."

A second classmate to McDermott: "I don't think you are any more right."

"Sure but ... to say that plot is bigger than character?"

McDermott laughed.

She read from Harold Bloom's new book, "Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human" -- a candidate for the National Book Award, too, in nonfiction -- in which he concludes that Shakespeare and peers such as Dante and Tolstoy remain great because their work reveals human character and personality.

"That's Faulkner all over again!" McDermott said. Earlier, she had assigned her students to read the speech that so influenced her.

McDermott's own effort to live up to the duty of a writer to mine the doom of human experience for its beauty and truth is tempered by the work-a-day. In the family she grew up in, no one would tolerate pretension, she says. Being a writer doesn't excuse her from everyday duties. Last Thursday, for instance, McDermott had about an hour left in the day to write after a visit to the dentist, volunteering at the book fair at her sons' school and running to the grocery. She and her husband, David Armstrong, a neuroscientist for a Philadelphia university, have three children, Will, 13, Eames, 10, and Patrick, 5.

"It's a great gift to be able to pursue the thing you must pursue," McDermott said. "I haven't yet gotten over that."

Her students find her completely approachable. "That's why I like her," Friedman says. "She is not a writer with a capital W."

Last week he was meeting with McDermott in her Hopkins office when the phone rang. He listened as her voice turned terse and agitated.

Was somebody breaking the bad news about the book award, he wondered? Was it yet another reporter or photographer eating into her time?

When she hung up, he offered sympathy: "You must be ready for this to be over."

The caller, he learned, was not Tom Wolfe. Only the guy who was supposed to tow McDermott's car after the key broke off in the lock at a rest stop in Hagerstown. Sitting in the car, waiting for the tow truck, watching people come and go, for hours, it seemed, McDermott's 13-year-old son turned to her and said, "Mom, should I start keeping a journal now?"

He is one part of her legacy. More is on her desk in the shape of two novels.

"Life itself, without plot, is awful and absurd," the reluctant writer says. "You live, and then it's over, you die. The basic outline is enough to make you crazy. Somebody has to make sense of it. That is the job of a writer."

Faulkner, all over again.

Nominees

Tonight, the 49th annual National Book Awards will be announced at a dinner at New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel. The nominees are:

* Fiction: Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full," Robert Stone's "Damascus Gate," Gayl Jones' "The Healing," Allegra Goodman's "Kaaterskill Falls" and Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy."

* Nonfiction: Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family," Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," Beth Kephart's "A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage," Yaffa Eliach's "There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok" and Henry Mayer's "All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of American Slavery."

* Poetry: B.H. Fairchild, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Carl Phillips and Gerald Stern.

* Young people's literature: Ann Cameron, Jack Gantos, Anita Lobel, Richard Peck and Louis Sachar.

Pub Date: 11/18/98