Raking Up The Ashes

By Paul Gray

Anyone want to buy a memoir by a guy named McCourt? Silly question. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, a haunting account of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, has been translated into 19 languages, including Turkish and Croatian, and has sold 4 million copies worldwide. The book has spent 90 weeks at or near the top of the New York Times Book Review best-seller list and earned its author, 67, a clutch of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

But does Frank's pandemic success mean that people will rush out and purchase a memoir by his younger brother Malachy, 66, specifically A Monk Swimming (Hyperion; 290 pages; $23.95)? This question is slightly less silly; Malachy's publisher has wagered a $600,000 advance to its novice author in hope that the answer will be a cash-register-ringing yes. And in his acknowledgments at the beginning of the book, Malachy thanks Frank "for opening the golden door." It's not hard to figure out what he means.

But since Frank's reputation is being used to lure prospective customers to Malachy's book, a perhaps churlish caveat emptor seems in order: A Monk Swimming is no Angela's Ashes. In fairness to Malachy, he never pretends to be writing anything remotely resembling his elder brother's book. But what he thinks he is doing instead on his pages never becomes particularly clear.

Although he occasionally flashes back to the Limerick life portrayed in Angela's Ashes, Malachy chiefly recounts what happened to him after his arrival in New York City in 1952, when he was 20. He worked for a while as a longshoreman, gained a reputation as a hard-drinking wit and raconteur, became an off-Broadway actor, appeared with Jack Paar on the Tonight show, tended bar as part owner of an East Side joint named Malachy's and later, down on his luck, smuggled gold ingots strapped about his portly person into India.

It is an entertaining story excruciatingly told. Malachy tries to reproduce his pub palavers, forgetting that all the ensuing laughter came from people gathered around him who were drinking or already drunk. The printed page is a less forgiving environment. There, gassy circumlocutions quickly grow tiresome. Liquor is never straightforwardly liquor but rather "the waters of life" or "the spirits that cheer" or "the squeezings of Bacchus." When Malachy meets an Irish actor, he does his all too customary stage-Irish routine: "Begod, Sir, you'd never think the man was from Cork, atall, atall..." And here is our thoughtful memoirist on his conduct during his first wife's first pregnancy: "There was many the night I wouldn't return to the marital bed, as there would be the bed of a nubile, adoring young thing to be tried for the resiliency of its springs, and whose walls needed acoustical testing."

Malachy still expresses grief and self-pity at this wife's eventual escape from him, taking their two small children with her. He makes no connection between his own alcohol-fueled irresponsibilities and those of his father, whom he blames bitterly for abandoning his mother and siblings. If he has not learned anything from pondering his disruptive behavior of more than three decades ago, perhaps a memoir is premature.

Yet the opportunity created by Angela's Ashes was too lucrative to resist. Malachy has played minor roles in such Hollywood films as The Devil's Own, She's the One and The Bonfire of the Vanities, but, he notes in an interview, "when you get to a certain age, the lights begin to go out." As he sets forth on a publicity tour for A Monk Swimming, Malachy, happily remarried for 33 years, says he has been off the sauce for "about 14 years" and that he doesn't worry about potential criticisms of his book: "That it is not as good as Angela's Ashes. That I am not Frank McCourt." He also notes that for most of their years in the U.S., Frank, a high school teacher, was known as the rollicking Malachy's brother rather than the reverse identification that occurred after the success of Frank's book. "Now I'm his [brother]," Malachy says, joking that the publication of A Monk Swimming will change all that again.

Despite their potential rivalry, the brothers remain cordial. How does Frank feel about Malachy's literary debut? "I think it's a good thing for him to do it. He gets a bit of money, helps him out. He wasn't making much money as an actor. So if it sells well, they might sign him up for another book." And has he read A Monk Swimming? No, because he is writing a sequel to Angela's Ashes, titled 'Tis, about the same drinking years in Manhattan that Malachy covers. "I won't read it until I'm finished with my own book. I can't." Lucky Frank.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York