Angela's Ashes

By Frank McCourt
Scribner, $23

ISBN 0684874350

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Review by Katherine Harrison

With the ever-increasing popularity of the memoir, it becomes necessary to pause and take stock of the genre as a whole. To find in the hundreds of published memoirs the one devoid of self-indulgence, or even worse, self-pity, is rare. Angela's Ashes is a rarity. It stands out against the countless others, like its characters stand in sharp contrast to the bleak landscape around them.

Frank McCourt recounts this story of his life, from his birth to Irish immigrants living in Depression-era Brooklyn to his childhood in the impoverished slums of Limerick, Ireland. Though the family's troubles begin in New York, it is in Ireland that Frank is confronted with even greater poverty, discrimination, and tragedy. As a "Yankee" and a son of a man from the North of Ireland, Frank is a target of ridicule from his own extended family as well as from the community and the Catholic church. At one point his father, Malachy, instructs him in Latin so that Frank can be an altar boy. After much practice Frank and his father go to the church only to be rejected the minute the priest passes a critical eye over their threadbare clothes and hears Malachy's accent.

Frank's father can't hold down a job, and the little money that he does make goes to support his drinking habit rather than feed or clothe his family. He frequently takes "long walks" into the country and comes stumbling home through the lanes much later, a fallen patriot, singing the songs of the Ireland of old. Frank's mother, Angela, must struggle to keep her children alive, giving her infants water and sugar instead of milk and searching for coal on the side of the road so they might have a fire. Her sacrifices, though endless, unfortunately cannot save all her children.

Despite their hardship, even despite Malachy's alcoholism, there exists in this family not only the will to survive but a quiet, heartbroken love -- a love that ultimately holds them together and sustains them. This memoir is neither bitter nor too sweetened with nostalgia. Its voice is strong and unique. What is so extraordinary about this narrator is not just all he is made to endure, but the way in which he endures it. It is a history, no matter how tragic, told with compassion and often with humor. The Irish tradition is rich with storytelling, and, fortunately for us, Frank McCourt is born of this heritage.

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