From the first page, it’s easy to see why literary insiders have been buzzing about McCourt since early summer, after advance copies of his book started circulating and The New Yorker ran a long excerpt. Musical, intelligent, confiding, his confident voice belies the fact that this is the first book from a former New York City schoolteacher. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” he writes. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants who soon returned to Ireland, McCourt grew up in Limerick, a soggy city where the pervasive wet “created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks.” His baby sister had died in America; his little twin brothers died soon after the family arrived in Ireland. His mother suffered through pneumonia, and McCourt survived typhoid. When the dad did find the infrequent job, he drank his paycheck on the way home, leaving the family to depend on charity and the grudging help of relatives. The McCourts’ rented house sat beside the only outhouse for a whole lane of houses. When it rained, their downstairs, dubbed “Ireland,” flooded. Upstairs, marginally warmer, they called “Italy.”
With a keen memory for character and the music of Irish speech, McCourt can climb inside a boy’s head and piece the world together with a child’s illogic. He writes about his bout with typhoid: “It’s dark and Dr. Campbell is sitting by my bed. He’s holding my wrist and looking at his watch… He sits now and hums and looks out the window. His eyes close and he snores a little. He tilts over on the chair and farts and smiles to himself and I know now I’m going to get better because a doctor would never fart in the presence of a dying boy.”
Conversation in “Angela’s Ashes” is rendered without quotation marks, and MeCourt is almost as sparing with commas, as though he were anxious that nothing, not even punctuation, should slow the telling of these tales. Given the oceans of suffering he unleashes, that speed is a blessing. But it leaves no room for reflection, and in the end McCourt’s haste–to escape childhood and Limerick, to return to America–gets the best of him. He has taught us to care not just about little Frank but about his brothers, his mother and even his good-for-nothing father, but he can’t take the time to tell us what happened to those people. One suspects that for McCourt, memoir is not about getting the facts straight but a way of putting esthetic distance between himselfand the pain of his past. The biographical note on the book’s jacket tells us that the author and his brother Malachy have performed a musical review, “A Couple of Bla-guards,” about their childhood another hint that McCourt is an old hand at defusing bad memories by turning them into entertainment. And given his childhood cir-cumstances, one can hardly blame him. Indeed, the craving for more that we feel at the end of this book is less McCourt’s fault than it is to his credit. It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he’s done. With “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt proves himself one of the very best.
