Sunday, August 15, 2004

Gloomy With Rain, Again

We've got a couple more days of it, too. Gray, damp, and gloomy.

I finished reading Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which I had picked up in Great Barrington at the Yellow House used book store in the movie tie-in paperback version with the kid actor's face on the cover. I was looking for something gripping to read for vacation, and I had put this one off for a long time, as I always do with best sellers out of reverse snobbishness ("Oh no, I'm not reading the popular best-seller, I'm reading this 18th century pre-cursor to Jane Austen's domestic dramas....")

Not that I ever begrudged Frank McCourt his success: a life long high school English teacher who I may actually have met when I did a Teachers & Writers Collaborative job in the late seventies at Stuyvesant High School. Also, a little earlier, when I was working with Phillip Lopate and the others at P.S. 75 (also through T&W), Malachy McCourt the actor (and next younger brother of Frank) lived in the neighborhood, and we taught his kids, I think.

As to the book-- it was very good, although in the end a comedy in the classical sense of having a happy ending in spite of the extraordinary poverty, detailed with great gusto, and the runaway drunken dad, and the little dead siblings and others. It's told with highly appropriate energy-- that biological optimism of children again-- and with linked anecdotes and tales, structured well and naturally by little Frankie's chronological age, quintessential experiences, and lovely insights and misunderstandings, always right on target agewise and usually highly entertaining to read.

In the end, it is an oddly light book-- or perhaps only told with a light touch. I have this feeling that reviewers and book club people may have mistaken it for a profound and tragic book that wasn't painful to read. Am I being snobbish again? There are infinitely painful moments -- hunger, humiliation, misunderstandings, and disappointments galore-- but there is that determined bouncing back that somehow makes all of us who have survived whatever small setbacks in our own lives seem enhanced by little Frankie's survival.

Well, I liked the book.


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