Angela's Ashes: A Memoir.

The moment of the memoir has arrived, or so the New York Times Magazine announced in a recent issue. From the dark familial odysseys of Mary Gordon and Mary Karr, to the drinking lives of Pete Hammill and Caroline Knapp, to the ad nauseam absurdity of Dennis Rodman, writers and would-be writers are celebrating self-hood with voluminous success. In the issue devoted to the memoir, the level of suffering heaped upon the reader, the jockeying for empathy and sympathy were nearly unbearable, now that tragic dysfunction and self-pity have evidently superseded the Bildungsroman models set forth by Rousseau and old Ben Franklin.

This century, Joyce and Proust dumped their lives into their fiction, but left it to the biographers to patch together the shards of heart and soul strewn throughout their work. In scanning the landscape of contemporary autobiography, one can't help but feel the nudge of our confessional, talk-show culture elbowing up the intellectual food chain, perhaps suggesting that the novel is no longer immediate enough to transmit maximum emotional impact, especially in our increasingly cyber-paced age.

Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, is certainly contemporary in its vivid, unflinching portrait of human suffering. Born to Irish immigrants in Depression-era Brooklyn, McCourt's mother (Angela) and father can eke out only a dirty, pathetic life in America, so they return to family in Ireland.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious, defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred years.

This is one of the rare passages where McCourt, a retired New York City high school (Stuyvesant) teacher, allows his present-day self to intrude into the narrative and stake a claim in a very crowded field. And while it is perhaps unfair to knock a memoir for evoking stereotypes, the travails McCourt describes are, by now, quite familiar. The voice he writes in - an eternal child, in the present tense - prohibits a tempered acknowledgment of the nearly mythic quality of these grim memories. As a consequence, Angela's Ashes can at times seem more a weepy compendium of "Irishness" than a slice of a single, examined life.

None of which diminishes the raw power of McCourt's story, however. "I wonder how I managed to survive at all," he writes early on. And by the time McCourt is nineteen, we appreciate the awesome desperation in this seemingly hackneyed statement. A baby sister dies in Brooklyn, and two more brothers die in Ireland. Young girls he falls in love with die as well.

McCourt himself is beset with afflictions brought on by the starvation and squalor in his family's lice-infested Limerick slum, including a bout of typhoid and the "scabby eyes" of conjunctivitis. "I'm going to die and I don't care," he says while a priest administers extreme unction, later admitting that he envies a friend "whose relations are dropping one by one" because "he gets a week off from school [and people will give him] money and sweets for his sorrow."

Death is not only physical and familial in McCourt's Limerick, but religious and political as well. "The [school] master says it's a glorious thing to die for Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live."

There is certainly a Joycean ring here. But McCourt's wicked schoolmasters, his father's "Irish thing" (drinking), the provincial bigotry and patriarchy of the West of Ireland, the ubiquity and banality of death, while vivid, also beg for some authorial perspective. What is most moving in this book - from the romance and humor to the sex and death - is depicted with a hushed subtlety. The most complex characters tend to be peripheral ones, who compress McCourt's themes into a dense line or two. As his intellectual aspirations grow, for example, Frank listens to Shakespeare through the window of the only home on the lane with a radio. When the owner repeats the off-heard assertion that the Great Bard "must have been an Irishman," the great wonders beyond Limerick viscerally collide with the fierce provincial nationalism that surrounds McCourt.

The portrait of any fledgling artist must outline the journey toward intellectual enlightenment. And for an Irish writer, the heavy blanket of Catholicism, and the gleaming morning sunlight of America across the Atlantic, must be markers on that journey.

McCourt's handling of religion can seem stock, but there are quiet deaths of faith among the flock which bite. "Mam says sure God is good for someone somewhere but He hasn't been seen lately in the lanes of Limerick." And yet, it should be noted that much of the aid the desperate McCourts receive comes from local religious authorities. The permanence of religion in Irish life is tempered by the need to view it skeptically. Damnation, salvation, and mundane faithlessness all are doled out in equal portions.

But teen-age Frank is most smitten by America. Hollywood's cowboy and Cagney films quench his parched mind, and, with a quick hand, and odd jobs working for the contemptuous upper classes (which also spur him on to hone his writing skills), McCourt collects enough money to head for New York. And there is a wonderful final scene, involving a priest, a lonely wife, and an unanswered knock on a bedroom door, which serves as an epiphanic bridge from Ireland to America, from McCourt's youth to his adulthood.

The rather stoic tone of Angela's Ashes aside, there are moments of gentle revelation, poignant ambiguity, and tragic brilliance that great novelists would kill to have written - the destruction of the McCourts' house because too much wood was broken off for the fire; or Frank and his brother succumbing to the irresistible temptation to try on their father's fake teeth; or McCourt's assertion that "I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him," the gentle morning man with the paper, the evening storyteller, and the drunk.

"[T]he happy childhood is hardly worth your while," McCourt writes, acknowledging the climate of competitive bleakness which seems to have descended upon memoirists. But Angela's Ashes asks not for therapeutic catharsis or closure, despite the pain of McCourt's youth and the forbearance manifested in his escape. Both lucid and harrowing at his best, McCourt is aware that there are no easy solutions in a world where, as a doctor tells his family, sometimes "God ask[s] for too much, too damn much."

Thomas Deignan, who reviews books regularly for the Irish Voice, also teaches American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.