Angela’s Ashes

I’m reading Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes. I recently showed a video, “People Like Us,” to my Seminar in Thinking and Writing students. In the video, a talking head says that everyone with class aspirations has a copy of Angela’s Ashes, but that nobody has read it. Kind of like the opposite of The Bridges of Madison County, which people with class apsirations tried to hide.

Anyway, my parents passed on their copy of AA to me, and there it was, sitting on the shelf, so I started reading it. I think one or two of the short stories in James Joyce’s The Dubliners does a better job of capturing the misearable and pathetic state of the Irish destitue, though the motion of the family from America back to Ireland offers an interesting twist; the McCort children are taunted for being Yanks.

I’m about half way through the book and the narrator is still only about five or six years old. He does a great job jerking your heart around, as when the drunken lout of a father eases his baby’s raspy breathing by sucking the snot out of his nose — not exactly a classy thing to do, but his wife looks at him adoringly for it. Then, after a long bout of unemployment, the father finally lands a job, drinks his wages on Friday night (again), is so drunk he misses work the next day, and loses his job.

Pathetic.

It’s supposed to be a memoir, which means that it all really happened that way and I can’t fault the narrator for unrealistic plot twists or maudlin attempts at melodrama. Most of the time, the childish eyes of the narrator can’t see clearly enough to criticize. The effect is similar to that of Benjy’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury — Benjy is an objective reporter who offers no sense of awareness outside himself (except for the final few lines, where he indicates that he trusts Caddy when she tells him he has been dreaming).

But in the tale of the father losing his job, I felt myself resisting the narrator’s attempt to pull my heartstrings. Am I a bad person because I roll my eyes at the predicability of the plot? Am I not quite able to enter into the young narrator’s world? Am I too reluctant to give up my romantic view of the Irish side of my family (on my mother’s mother’s side)?

While driving Torill Mortensen to the airport after her visit to Seton Hill, I learned a very enligthenting discussion about the way Europeans feel about their distant American relations who return to the villages of their ancestors after two or three generations of no contact with their roots. It’s certainly not the fault of these travellers that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents never came back to their ancestral villages, and I can certainly see it is ridiculous to suggest that people should drop what they are doing to throw a prade for distant relations who wish to play detective in the cemeteries and church record offices. Torill mentioned that, to those who stayed, the Americans who come back are the decendents of people who left. America wouldn’t be what it is today if it had not been for the passion and drive of generations of people who left their homelands in search of building a better life for themselves.

Maybe the book will change eventually, but when I read Angela’s Ashes, I can’t help but think to myself, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” And I don’t like thinking that way, mostly because it’s not exactly fashionable for Americans to show their patriotism in international circles these days.

This isn’t a very intellectual blog entry, but I’m gonna submit it anyway.

3 thoughts on “Angela’s Ashes

  1. “But then I didn’t get to say my opinion, so I just went with whatever she said for the coveted “A” in that class.”

    Ouch! I’ve read a little more in the book, and as the narrator gets older the stories get more complex. I laughed out loud at the story of Frankie’s First Communion. [Whoops — initially I submitted this as “Anonymous”. –DGJ]

  2. I read Angela’s Ashes for a school project in 11th grade. I hated every moment of that stupid, ill-written book. And then we read an excerpt in class and my teacher tried to pass it off as satire! It was real life for them. I didn’t see the satire in it at all. It is written from the McCourt’s childish persona, but I just don’t see it. But then I didn’t get to say my opinion, so I just went with whatever she said for the coveted “A” in that class.
    What a waste of my time. I mean I do want to get in touch with my Irish side. I know that it isn’t all lucky charms and leprechauns, but this book didn’t do it for me. It is an endless cycle of drunkenness and poverty. I could find the same thing with Joyce (who also stinks–give me a break with the stream of consciousness crap).
    Suggestion: Don’t read on. Stop. Just move on to another book like the new Morrison novel. She really can pluck your heartstrings. Being a literate Irish person does not mean you have to read Irish-authored literature, even if you want to learn more about your generational background. I learned that the hard way, with each plodding step of the “plot” in Angela’s Ashes.

  3. Glad you did enter it, and this isn’t a real intellectual comment, but more on the technical side. I really enjoyed Bridges of Madison County–even after already having seen the movie with superhunky Clint. Never picked up Angela’s Ashes probably because it was so highly touted as the “in” thing to read. But I will now, because as a writer, I want to absorb style as well as story. Wrote a quickie novel a few years back and then went out and bought the latest Danielle Steel. It inspired me to continue my own writing because the book I’d gotten was after she had successfully published so many and I think it displayed a bit of boredom with her craft so I wasn’t impressed. Professor Ersinghaus has led me to a new way of reading as well as writing.

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