Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Somewhere along the way, I've missed out on reading certain books that it seems everyone else has read. For example, on my reading list right now is "anything by Jane Austin or a Bronte sister" because that covers a class of books from which (embarrassingly) I have not read anything. Angela's Ashes is another example. In retrospect I may have skipped this book intentionally: every once in a while there is a book that is passed around as a must-read and sometimes it is good (Kite Runner, Life of Pi) but usually it is indicative of how little America reads (Da Vinci Code). Don't get me wrong, I liked the Da Vinci Code and I read most of Oprah's picks, but I don't always find the most hyped books (even the more serious-looking "trade paperbacks") to be the best. I think I had categorized Angela's Ashes as such, obviously incorrectly. Maybe the Pulizter Prize should have tipped me off.

Angela's Ashes is a memoir about growing up in abject poverty in Ireland. McCourt's family begins in America and then as economic and family pressures build, they move back to Ireland when McCourt is five. He chronicles different events in his life through age nineteen; at that point he returns to the U.S., where he lives now. (His story continues in Tis, which is now on my reading list.)

I was shocked by the conditions under which he lived. In a world of antibacterial soap and Tupperware and "use by" dates, it is hard to internalize what his life was like, although he describes it in detail. There are heartbreaking scenes throughout the book such as his licking the newsprint that fish and chips were brought home in, and flipping a mattress to confuse the fleas. Thus, I was shocked at how much humor he found in his childhood. As a narrator, his trustworthiness is reasonably confirmed by his self-depricating style. As Frank in the story gets older, McCourt writes with an increasing amount of self-awareness and humor. For example, this passage is from the night before his first day at work:

"The next worse thing is to be out in the backyard filling the kettle from the tap with the moon beaming away and Kathleen Purcell from next door perched up on the wall looking for her cat. God, Frankie McCourt, what are you doin' in your grandmother's dress? and you have to stand there in the dress with the kettle in your hand and explain how you washed your clothes which are hanging there on the line for all to see and you were so cold in the bed you put on your grandmother's dress and your uncle Pat, The Abbot, fell down and was brought home by Aunt Aggie and her husband, Pa Keating, and she drove you in to the backyard to fill this kettle and you'll take off this dress as soon as ever your clothes are dry because you never had nay desire to go through life in your dead grandmother's dress."

Alcohol played a very prevalent role in the lives of the characters he wrote about. This aspect of the story reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie's father is an alcoholic who can't hold down a job. The similarities between the themes in the two books was strong; despite TGiB being fiction, the two books bridge the geographical distance between the U.S. and Ireland to tell a single narrative of poverty and culture. At the beginning of Angela's Ashes, McCourt summarizes the story of the Irish:

"People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years."

Indeed, McCourt tells the story of an entire demographic just by telling his own life story. Recommended.