Krishna
Though I had heard that this book, a sequel to his excellent debut with Angela’s Ashes, is not as good as the first one, I was hooked with his writing style and his vein of wry humour running through the tale.
That is, in the initial few pages. Then the book does fulfil the earlier reports and falls down into the gutter, and mostly stays there. Yes, there are some really nice pieces, but overall, it is a pale shadow of the first book by Frank McCourt.
The story starts with him leaving in a boat to America with starry dreams of New York in his eyes. He meets an interesting chaplain, a rich couple whom he is too shy to charm so that ‘they will take him under his wings’ and also a sailor who is charmed by his habit of reading Dostoyevsky from the ship’s library.
The priest seems to be a strange mix of piety and sin, and Frank parts from him and feels alone in New York.
He talks about his feeling lost in New York, his awkwardness with girls and dancing – all in that endearing style that won us over in his masterpiece Angela’s Ashes before.
We realize that his eyes are so red that it frightens the young boys and girls and he is sent to a doctor. The doctor says that he has some weird dandruff that falls into his eyes and advises him to shave his head and apply a lotion he prescribed. He cannot now work in the hotel and is demoted to upstairs work behind the scenes, cleaning out toilets. His salary is barely enough for him but his mom asks for more money to be sent to Ireland and he struggles through everything.
He goes back to his village in Ireland and is offended that his mother is not living in the house he helped provide for and sticks to the squalor of the previous place because her uncle is there and he refuses to go anywhere else.
Back in the army, he now takes over as the dispatcher of messages and becomes good at it.
As you read on, the magic fades. You still see that he has an interesting turn of phrase but it is all the same formula. He describes his work at the docks for money, his drinking sessions, the loss of his only girlfriend Emma to an insurance man due to his wayward attitude, his trying to reform by getting a job – ironically in Blue Cross, an insurance company – all seem mundane. This is like reading a diary of a man’s daily deeds (or some twitter accounts that read like ‘today there was a big puddle in the middle of the street due to a sudden downpour’) and you say, ‘So what?’. It is well written but goes nowhere and you begin to tire of the details of his life’s progress. Without the central and despicable personality like his dad who loomed over his earlier ‘Angela’s Ashes’ this book is really limp.
He then leaves the job to go join a University in New York. He does not fit in with those kids talking about existentialism and trashing teaching as a profession.
He writes stories about his shameful past – some events that took place during the time of his previous novel Angela’s Ashes – but the class seems to like him and the girls find it moving and emotional.
His style also gets grating after it gets cute. He catches hold of one idea and repeats it ad nauseum until the next chapter when a different cycle starts. For example ‘Michael what’s left of him’ is introduced and for the next twenty or so pages you hear nothing but that until you want to scream ‘Yeah, I get it. Move on.’ At least in the earlier book there were difficulties and the father was quite a character. (He makes a guest appearance here too). But here it is all about Frank’s experiences in New York. What he did first, then what he did next, how he was hopeless at dating or dancing, how he went from civilian to army work and back, and so on and so on. Unless you adore the narration style he repeatedly and uniformly employs, this book is a pale shadow of the other one.
It goes on about a fellow student who is pretty and goes out with him but is dating a football player and intends to marry her. And on and on.
He finally sleeps with Mike and then gets a job as a teacher in a rowdy school.
More of the same style of narration follows, with people advising him different ways and he mulling over it. There is this instance where, having failed to pay his electricity bills, he gets a downstairs occupant (who worked with him in a factory earlier) to plug his outlet and then, when many days later, the ‘friend’ cuts it off, torments him with a spoon rattling on the latter’s window. Ultimately, the friend leaves not able to take the torture.
Well the attempt at humour is there but without anything significant to say – unlike in the first book of his – this all reads like the laments of a whiny baby whose self pity seems to fill page after page. On top of that, he gets a weird roommate (moocher actually) who likes to talk high philosophical nonsense while wandering around Frank’s apartment stark naked. The humour fails. The story sucks and you want to tell Frank not to be a crybaby about every little thing that happens in his daily life, and finally you want to tell him you are no longer interested in the story and are staying to finish it because of the prior investment you have made so far in this book.
Looks like I will give the next book in the sequence, The Teacher Man, a miss.
There is not much more to tell. The mother coming in to US and turning her nose up at everything her kids are doing different – including their choice of spouses – provides a little spark of the old brilliance but that is too brief to keep interest sustained.
The story does pick up when his mother comes to live in USA and tries to reconcile with a dad who had turned a ‘new man’ and wants to visit. However, he lands pig drunk (on the ship) and is the same old man! His mother sends the man packing to Ireland.
Towards the end, he goes into his teaching career, I guess a prelude to his last book, The Teacher Man. He is now married and has a girl. They all go visit Belfast, where he sees his father in advanced stages of dementia. He also finds his mom increasingly enfeebled by emphysema (caused by excessive lifetime smoking). And so the story limps on.
The humour is there for sure. He has the gift of charming descriptions – except in the highly repetitive expressions that annoy rather than amuse, as described earlier in this review. Overall, it keeps your interest, but nowhere near the first, and in my opinion the best, book – Angela’s Ashes.
He goes through his life, his marriage and the breakup of the marriage. There are some real bright sparks, in describing his mother’s settling down in USA and her quirks until the very end, the hospitalization and the passing away of the mother.
The book ends with the death of his father, the infamous central character in the previous book, and again, there are some interesting vignettes of how he feels at his father’s funeral and also, as a backdrop, what Belfast was like at that time.
A mixed bag of narration, but mostly uninspiring.
4/10
= = Krishna