'Tis

...Toward the end of the book he writes, "Why can't I have a bright, carefree life like my brothers Malachy and Michael, uptown in the bar serving drinks to beautiful women and bantering with Ivy League graduates...

...No barefoot children...

...He didn't hit anyone or starve anyone and...what he did was not as bad as running off to England and leaving your wife and children to starve the way my father did but what he did was bad because he's a priest and they're not supposed to murder people or interfere with them in any way...

...Oh, yes...

...in the worst of them twelve men share two bath towels for two weeks at a time until one of the boarders rebels and buys his own towel...

...But the familiar intimacy appears only in the accounts of his parents' deaths...

...No women in shawls...

...I suppose you notice all kinds of changes in Limerick...

...Frank is carried through these vicissitudes by the same liveliness, diligence, and pluck that served him in his account of his childhood...

...In private, Frank is stuffing himself with the world's best books and trying to puzzle out the big Commonweal 15 October 22,1999 questions...

...He lives in a dismaying series of rooms...

...Plagued by the guilt he says was instilled in him by the church, he still wants to learn how to make moral distinctions and mediate questions of good and evil...

...In this brief sketch McCourt manages to portray the essential characters and personalities of his parents and give a convincing picture of the life the family led...

...With his characteristic good humor, Mc-Court writes in appreciation: "We'll miss [Peter], the way he opened up the world of towels to us...

...So, to a lesser extent, is 'Tis, which begins exactly where Angela's Ashes leaves off, with Frank's return to America to seek his fortune...

...Tis as a sequel to Angela's Ashes ends a little more than halfway through the book, with Frank's graduation from NYU, the beginning of his teaching career, and his marriage...

...In his own words "I was always on the periphery—like my father, an outsider...

...Writing of a priest who tries to seduce him: "I don't have any grudge against him...

...Angela's Ashes, the brilliant first volume of McCourt's memoirs, is an assemblage of particulars...

...He wishes he could be Commonweal 14 October 22,1999 like his friend DiAngelo, "making up my own mind about everything, not giving a fiddler's fart, like my uncle Pa Keating back in Limerick...

...At NYU on the G.I...

...Bill, Frank is more the outsider than ever—poor, foreign, socially inept, unsophisticated ("I know from the way they say it that bubkes isn't good and that's another word I have to look up along with existentialism...

...Frank McCourt deserves our gratitude for noticing peculiar things and making them eloquent...

...as he struggles to earn his living loading and unloading trucks at warehouses in the Bronx, the butt of the vicious and vulgar taunts of his fellow workers...

...Molly Finn, a frequent Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City...

...It ends in 1985 with the death of both his parents...

...The narrator is more distant, less open...

...McCourt's focus on particular details of his life lends a piercing truthfulness to his work and preserves him from the pitfalls that lie in wait for so many writers of memoirs...

...Almost always with a touch of humor and self-ridicule Frank the outsider leads us through his world as he works in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel cleaning up after his rich, tanned, educated contemporaries...

...People in his life need privacy...

...That's an eloquent expression of a characteristic longing that persists through McCourt's life...

...If I'd stayed there and taken the exam I'd be a postman now strolling from street to street...going home for my tea without a worry in the world...

...Painfully aware of his red eyes ("like pissholes in the snow") and rotten teeth, he confesses envy of tanned, clear-eyed, white-toothed American suburbanites, but knows their lot will never be his...

...The fully adult life is presented with familiar pungency, wit, and mild self-mockery, but the voice has changed...

...The voice is the same...

...Though he envies his Uncle Pa for his defiant spirit, what he admires most is his uncle's truthfulness: "You could never imagine Uncle Pa telling a lie...

...Returning to Limerick after many years away, McCourt runs into an acquaintance on the street...

...McCourt is a genius of the particular...

...the innocence, naivete, and humor remain recognizable throughout Frank's young adulthood...

...Rich imagination, brilliant selection of expressive details, unerring choice of words...

...If you wanted to draw a lesson from Frank McCourt's writing it might be that any subject matter is rich in the hands of a master...

...In about five hundred words it describes in detail how the family came into possession of a "new" bed at the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, wheeled it home in three installments on top of the baby in his bockety-wheeled pram, dragged it upstairs, put it together, spread over it the old overcoats they used in lieu of sheets and blankets, and had a comforting cup of tea...

...Nolly Finn Five years after landing in New York as a penniless, pimply faced nineteen-year-old with rotten teeth, infected eyes, a strong brogue, and a headful of romantic ideas about America, Frank McCourt is sitting in a classroom at NYU listening to the instructor reading Frank's assigned essay aloud: "Why he gave me an A, that my style is direct, my subject matter rich....He tells me I should continue to explore my rich past...

...More cars, fewer snotty Commonweal 16 October 22,1999 noses and scabby knees...

...Taking Angela's Ashes and 'Tis as a single work, we have come to know these parents so deeply that their deaths are a loss for us as well as for their children...

...Jesus, Frankie McCourt, them's peculiar things to be noticing...

...he has a daughter to protect...

...Rich subject matter...

...In one of the most astonishing passages in the book he wonders about the Germans he meets there, how much they know, whether they have dark memories in their heads...

...I don't know if it's proper to say the Our Father touching the door of an oven but it seems harmless enough and it's what I say hoping the Jewish dead will understand my ignorance...

...The constant struggle gets to him once in a while and "I wonder why I left Limerick at all...

...During his army stint, Frank finds himself on laundry detail in Dachau...

...as he blunders his way through a hitch in the army during the Korean War...

...The vignettes of his life as a teacher are sometimes interesting, often charming, occasionally revealing...

...I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie...

...We are led through a late adolescence and young adulthood refreshingly free of breast beating, navel gazing, soul searching...

...The essay, titled "The Bed," is a typical piece of McCourt writing...

...He tries to absorb the camp by touching the ovens...