Glad to Bury Angela’s Ashes
The Lit Ladies Book Club picked Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes, for September. I thought that was a great idea, especially since I was hosting our club meeting and, hey, my name is “Angela.” Well, my namesake book was by far the hardest read I’ve had in a long, long time. I felt like I was in high school reading Grapes of Wrath or Farewell to Arms. If I’d had a choice to toss it aside, I would have. But, as I was forced to in high school, I had a commitment to finishing the darned thing (the last 200 pages I read at lightning speed). I followed up my reading with a snarky email reminder of the meeting time and date to the Book Club girls. I suggested that anyone who dared to say they liked it, would be shoved outside for fear they were delirious with swine flu!
All that negativity aside, we had one of our best Book Club meetings ever. It was a lively discussion about all of the horribleness that was Frank McCourt’s incredibly poor, disadvantaged childhood in Ireland. We enjoyed digging through some biographies of what happened to Frank and his brother later in life. Some Lit Ladies actually admitted that they were curious enough to perhaps, gasp, read his follow-up memoirs. I was content enough with my research 🙂
OK. Something positive…Angela’s Ashes gives a very no-nonsense view of a very depressed era in Ireland. I can appreciate that it’s one of the most interesting writing styles I’ve ever endured (not too positive). McCourt makes the voices and dialects and people very clear to the reader. Unfortunately, the monotony of this memoir got to me,and I just wanted to throw the book at the wall when I was done. Maybe too much of a good thing?
In closing, many reviews reference the humor of the memoir. They’ve got to be kidding? It is completely depressing. Perhaps the overbearing Catholic school teachers and fusty old family members would be funny if seen in the comedy sketches McCourt later performed on stage with his brother. In fact, we did laugh out loud in Book Club in retelling some of the occurrences (especially the chapter when “Typhoid Fever” was forbidden to talk through a wall to “Diphtheria”). But those lighter moments failed to bring any joy to the reading. Am I glad I read it? Only in the sense that it brought together a great Book Club session. Otherwise, I would really like those many hours back and cannot recommend it to any friend of mine.
