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Overview
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. 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.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.
Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
Synopsis
Sometimes it's worth the wait. Having waited 40 years to tell his story, Frank McCourt doesn't pull any punches in his story of growing up dirt poor in Limerick, Ireland. Having emigrated to America, McCourt's family returns to Ireland after his sister dies in Brooklyn. It is there that things turn from bad to worse.
It is McCourt's contention that there is nothing worse than Irish Catholic poverty, and his book would seem to bear it out: his family moves to a row house in Limerick that is located next to the street's lavatory. However, the book is written in a lyrical style from the point of view of Frank McCourt as a boy, and it is still filled with the whimsy of growing up and the natural humor of its author.
While the book is often angry (at the Church, at his father, at his poverty, at his mother), it is also filled with forgiveness without bitterness.Covering the ages spanning three to 19, Angela's Ashes is the story of Frank McCourt's struggle to escape from poverty and a tale of Ireland still seemingly in the dark ages. Barred from the good schools because of his class, teeth falling out from malnutrition, and facing life with a shiftless alcoholic father, McCourt nevertheless survives on his wits and manages to return to America to start his life over. Again. It is a triumph of both the art of memoir writing and the author's spirit.
People
A splendid memoir, both funny and forgiving.
Editorials
John Glassie
Why is this dark memoir, from a previously unpublished 66-year-old retired high-school teacher, generating so much buzz in publishing circles? It probably helps that Frank McCourt, a committed New York pub-crawler, has made a lot of influential lit-world friends while nursing pints of beer over the decades. But here's a less cynical answer: It's largely because Angela's Ashes relates McCourt's miserable, bruising Irish Catholic childhood in language that is as flinty and compelling as the story itself. He's soaked up some real literary ability along with the suds.Born in the U.S. at the start of the Depression to Irish immigrant parents, McCourt suffered early and often at the hands of his father—a man who rarely got work and when he did, drank his meager wages away. When the family decided to move back to Ireland, things went from very bad to much worse. They settled in a Limerick slum and went on the dole, which was "just enough for all of us to starve on." Indeed, neither of McCourt's two young twin brothers lived much beyond their second birthdays. Barely old enough himself to go to school, McCourt helped his mother Angela scrounge for "bits of coal that drop from lorries" so they could at least have a fire for tea. He gathered "everything that burns, coal, wood, cardboard, paper."
It was a life so brimming with hardship and grinding poverty that when McCourt returned home from months in the typhoid ward, he longed for "the hospital where the white sheets were changed everyday and where there wasn't a sign of a flea." Hope kindled when World War II created jobs in England and McCourt's father went off with the promise of sending money back to his family. They rarely heard from him again.
Throughout this tale, McCourt displays a wry sense of humor. "When you look at pictures of Jesus," he notes at one point, "He's always wandering around ancient Israel in a sheet. It never rains there and you never hear of anyone coughing or getting consumption or anything like that and no one has a job there because all they do is stand around and eat manna and shake their fists and go to crucifixions."
It's no surprise when, with his first real job as a telegram delivery boy, McCourt begins to plan his escape from this hell. The book's most triumphant moment occurs when he manages to make the return passage to America at age 19. With Angela's Ashes, McCourt has succeeded in turning bleak reality into literature that sings.
—Salon
Detroit Free Press
Every once in a while, a lucky reader comes across a book that makes an indelible impression, a book you immediately want to share with everyone around you....Frank McCourt's life, and his searing telling of it, reveal all we need to know about being human.—Linnea Lannon
New York Times
A classic modern memoir...stunning.—Michiko Kakutani
People
A splendid memoir, both funny and forgiving.Miami Herald
A monument to the self-perpetuating power of the human spirit...an accomplished, authoritative, and shimmering example of the memoirist's art.—Margaria Fichtner
Philadelphia Inquirer
A spellbinding memoir of childhood that swerves flawlessly between aching sadness and desperate humor...a work of lasting beauty.—Peter Finn
Michiko Kakutani
Stunning....Mr. McCourt does for the town of Limerick what the young Joyce did for Dublin.—The New York Times
Library Journal
McCourt is the eldest of eight children born to Angela Sheehan and Malachy McCourt in the 1930s. The McCourts began their family in poverty in Brooklyn, yet when Angela slipped into depression after the death of her only daughter (four of eight children survived), the family reversed the tide of emigration and returned to Ireland, living on public assistance in Limerick. McCourt's story is laced with the pain of extreme poverty, aggravated by an alcoholic father who abandoned the family during World War II. Given the burdens of grief and starvation, it's a tribute to his skill that he can serve the reader a tale of love, some sadness, but at least as much laughter as the McCourts' "Yankee" children knew growing up in the streets of Limerick. His story, almost impossible to put down, may well become a classic.—Robert Moore, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals, Framingham, Massachusetts
Patricia Monaghan
It is a wonder that McCourt survived his childhood in the slums of Depression-era Limerick, Ireland: three of his siblings did not, dying of minor illnesses complicated by near starvation. Even more astonishing is how generous of spirit he became and remains. His family lived—barely—in a flat so miserable that every year they had to cram themselves into an upstairs room when winter floods made the place only half-habitable. That upstairs room was "Italy"—warm and dry. Downstairs was Ireland—wet and cold. Father sat up there drinking tea, while mother Angela often could not rise from bed, so depressed was she. Or mother sat by the fire, waiting for father to return; when he did, frequently drunk on their little money, he would line up the boys and extract promises that they would die for Ireland.Dying was what everyone seemed to do best: the little sister, the twins, the girl with whom Frank first had sex, the old man Frank read to, too many boys from school, too many neighbors, too many relatives. McCourt spares us no details: the stench of the one toilet shared by an entire street, the insults of the charity officers, the maurauding rats, the street fights, the infected eyes, the fleas in the mattress...Yet he found a way to love in that miserable Limerick, and it is love one remembers as the dominant flavor in this Irish stew.
Booknews
A beautifully written memoir full of Irish wit and pathos, making it stand out among the garden variety of youthful reminisces. Let's face it, a bad childhood is more interesting and McCourt had it in spades. He was born in Brooklyn, but his family went back to Ireland where he grew up on the dole exacerbated by alcoholism his father's, near starvation, beatings by the schoolmasters, and a brief respite in clinic where he discovered Shakespeare. All of this would be merely stereotype in less capable hands, but McCourt's mastery of language manages to make us understand the gentleness, forgiveness, and humor that accompanies misery and enables its protagonists to survive with dignity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR booknews.comMichiko Kakutani
Stunning....Mr. McCourt does for the town of Limerick what the young Joyce did for Dublin.—The New York Times
Linnea Lannon
Astonishingly vivid...Frank McCourt's life, and his searing telling of it, reveals all we need to know about being human.—The Detroit Free Press
Vanessa V. Friedman
The power of this memoir is that it makes you believe the claim: that despite the rags, and hunger and pain, love and strength do come out of misery - as well as a page turner of a book. And though the experience it tells of was individual, the point - and the story - is universal.— Vanessa V. Friedman, Entertainment Weekly