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As someone who spent the majority of his formative childhood living
within the realms of a struggling blue-collar Irish-American Catholic
neighborhood housing project, much of the atmosphere and flavor so
memorably and powerfully described in this best-selling memoir seems
like familiar territory, from the hard-drinking and somewhat remote and
indifferent fathers to the sainted mothers, from the raucous black
humor to the spasms of terrible drama and tragedy, often visited on
helplessly impoverished children. Yet Frank McCourt manages to display
a unusually colorful and quite unique descriptive power to the florid
retelling of this life lived under conditions of extreme privation and
misery, a life which he largely describes in terms so dismal, dark and
devoid of hope that it is remarkable to witness the degree of grace,
resilience, and good humor that he so often brings to bear. It is this
most prominent feature of his creative writing that gives such a
powerful testimony to his ability as a writer.
Like James Joyce's personal glimpses into Irish lives in his classic
series of short stories, "The Dubliners", McCourt evokes the
suffocating and smarmy atmosphere of flagrant poverty, to the point
that I often found the story difficult to read. Thus, regardless of how
well he illustrates the ways in which he and his family struggled to
overcome the circumstances, it was, for me at least, often difficult
reading. For any of us who have actually lived under such circumstances
of privation, these powerfully drawn recollections can be challenging
and painful to recall. And while I would never suggest that my own
experiences approach the extremes of want and squalor described herein,
I took a long time to finally work my way into the portions of the book
where the McCourt brothers finally triumph based on their American
citizenry. While the tone of the memoir is sometimes downbeat and
sullen, the progress of these two young pilgrims toward a life of
greater promise is one that gains ballast as we progress toward the
end.
The memoir is, as one has come to expect, full of the usual Irish
complaints, from the egregious and often outrageous alcoholism of the
father and Irish men in general to the full McCourt treatment regarding
the so-called Irish troubles and the unmitigated perfidy of the dreaded
English. Having heard all this throughout my fifty years, it finally
becomes tiresome, boring and irrelevant to hear all the highly polished
and crudely embellished litanies again and again here. We who are
either Irish or of Irish ancestry must learn to live with what we have,
to do the best we can to make the most of what we find our existential
circumstances may be, and I for one would hope that the reading of
books like this, books which faithfully chronicle the consequences of
all the particulars of traditional Irish working class culture, would
act to mollify the most extreme of these conditions and save the next
generation of young Irish men and women from its manifest dysfunctions.
Last update : 07-10-2006 06:46
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