Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996), the best-selling account of childhood poverty in Limerick, won him Pulitzer Prize and went on to hold its place at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for 17 consecutive weeks. An extract of the novel first appeared in an issue of the New York magazine, Here's Me Bus the year before. Molly Friedrich, McCourt's agent, traded the paperback rights for $1,000,000 before selling the film rights to producers Scot Rudin and David Brown.
Apart from some disgruntlement in Limerick, reactions in Ireland have been warm. Everyone seems to find it shocking and amusing but no one is quite ready to treat it as literary art. There is a sense of 'told you so' about its revelations, especially in the better-off faubourgs (okay, Dublin 4). However, not everyone is happy with its documentary pretensions and its assault on mother Ireland. Seamus Deane, reviewing in the Guardian (Manchester), concludes that 'the memoir's strange combination of the remembered with the stereotypical' are where 'its appeal and its problems lie'.
A mordantly witty first-person narration-not infinitely removed in style from that of The Butcher Boy-makes for comical and compulsive reading in spite of so much squalor. The management of sewage in a slum is a constant theme in every chapter. Much of the fun stems from the way McCourt pillories superstition, dogmatism, and sentimental nationalism, along with darker tendencies connected with the 'excitement' (his childhood word for sex).
The success Angela's Ashes might be seen in the context of the rise and rise of the Irish-childhood genre that started in earnest with Alice Taylor's barefoot idyll To School Through the Fields, which gave Oliver MacDonogh's Brandon Press its first market success in 1988. Though utterly different as a literary utterance, Deane's Reading in the Dark was first excerpted as 'Vanishings' in that year.
Certainly an element in the warm Irish reception of Angela's Ashes is a certain postcolonial breast-bearing. We don't seem to need to lie about the self-punishing puritanism of Irish life in the age of de Valera any longer. Whether this genre will converge with the 'victim' novel in the American manner is hard to guess, however. Dermot Healy kept his balance in his childhood memoir, The Bend in the Road (Harvill 1996). Perhaps the forthcoming novel of 'a Limerick childhood' promised by Pádraig Standún will provide a test-case for the literary fame of St. John's Quay and Mungret St., the Treatu Stone and Pery Square.
Is Angela's Ashes a one-off triumph? McCourt is busy writing a sequel dealing with his time in New York after his escape from Ireland with which the novel closes. The McCourts of Limerick (1998), a film on the subject, has been made by his brother Malachy, with whom he has co-author A Couple of Blaguards, a play peformed at Andrew's Lane Theatre in January 1998.