THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610200238
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: 75 lines
ANGELA'S ASHES
FRANK McCOURT
Scribner. 364 pp. $24.
Perhaps all true writing is an act of remembering, and Frank McCourt's breathtaking memoir Angela's Ashes is a recollection so vivid, by turns brutal and exuberant, heartbreaking and comic, that it seems to re-create the very form itself. This is a first book for McCourt, a 66-year-old retired New York schoolteacher, but obviously it is one he has led up to his entire life.
Angela's Ashes is a reversal of the usual Irish immigrant story. Frank's father, Malachy, comes from Northern Ireland to New York City, where he meets and, with a little pressure from her family, marries Angela Sheehan, a girl from the slums of Limerick. But the McCourts do not prosper, nor do they stay in the promised land. Malachy drinks and cannot hold a steady job, their infant daughter Margaret dies, and the family - Frank, who is 4, and his younger brothers Malachy, Oliver and Eugene - head back to Ireland, leaving the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in their wake.
As they head out of the harbor, Angela pregnant again, McCourt describes the unpromising departure: ``Then she (Angela) leaned over the side and vomited and the wind from the Atlantic blew it all over us and other happy people admiring the view. Passengers cursed and ran, seagulls came from all over the harbor and Mama hung limp and pale on the ship's rail.''
The problems only deepen when the family eventually arrives in Limerick. The father's drinking worsens, the family's poverty increases and the babies continue to come, and continue to die - of consumption and malnutrition. It is a sad, bleak story, one that seems to be right out of Dickens, a tale of such hunger and heartbreak that its truth makes it chilling.
It is the story of Frankie McCourt licking the grease from the newspaper of his uncle's discarded fish and chips as his only meal for the day; it is the story of teachers more vitriolic than Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard Times; it is the story of children with typhoid fever and rotting teeth, the story of indigence.
But it is also the story of a young boy growing up, as filled with life and truth as any great coming-of-age novel - D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers or James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And it is a story teeming with real characters, not heroes and villains.
McCourt's father is irresponsible, soaked in alcohol, a man with too much pride to carry grocery bags through the street but not enough honor to make sure that his children have soles on their shoes or food to eat. And yet, the father is a man who tells his children wonderful stories of Cuchulain, a gentle man, an Irish Rip Van Winkle, dreamy-eyed, good-natured, loving, pathetic. For young Frank, the father is like the Holy Trinity: ``three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with stories and the prayers, and the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.''
It is a magic trick, certainly, for a storyteller to be able to write with such honesty about alcoholism, poverty, cruelty and despair and still leave the reader feeling as if the narrative is filled with streaks of light, as if the story is truly about decency and love and endurance.
For, finally, that is exactly what Angela's Ashes is about. It is a young boy's story, and, perhaps, this is Frank McCourt's greatest achievement - his ability to recapture the voice of that boy, from 4 to 19. In his artistry, he is able to become that boy, to see through his eyes, to remember in such a cogent manner that his memories become ours. We live his story the way we live a fictional character's - in the re-imagined moments of felt life, in the laughter and horror that mirror our own existence.
Tobias Wolff once said that our memories are what make us. He was right: Our memories are what make our stories, and we are the stuff that stories are made on. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old
Dominion University and is the author of two memoir collections. His new
book on John McPhee is due out in January from Simon &
Schuster/Macmillian. by CNB