Pride and Prejudice

By R.Z. Sheppard

If you were charmed by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes but wished at times that the author would have got out of the way of his own beguiling style, try All Souls: A Family Story from Southie (Beacon Press; 288 pages; $24), Michael Patrick MacDonald's guileless and powerful memoir of precarious life and early death in Boston's Irish ghetto.

MacDonald, 33, grew up and still lives in South Boston, a legendary ethnic enclave that contains one of the country's highest concentrations of white poverty. The distinction is not appreciated by Southie residents, who bristle at being lumped with the black and Hispanic underclass.

Yet as MacDonald's jolting account illustrates, all share the same problems and are familiar with social workers, fatherless households and handouts of surplus cheese. "The only difference," writes the author, "was that in the black and Latino neighborhoods people were saying the words: poverty, drugs, guns, crime, race, class, corruption."

MacDonald gives new life to this old American story of poor-white pride and prejudice. He also has a knack for quickly grabbing and holding a reader's attention. How's this for an opening line? "I was back in Southie, 'the best place in the world,' as Ma used to say before the kids died."

"Ma" is Helen Murphy-MacDonald-King, a pub singer and feisty accordionist who gave birth to 11 children fathered by various husbands and boyfriends. In her signature miniskirts, fishnet stockings and spiked heels, Ma is an unmistakable Southie presence.

She embodies the neighborhood's pugnacious spirit and fierce loyalties. The emotional staying power of All Souls is boosted by MacDonald's ability to stay attached to those qualities at the same time that he describes their devastating consequences.

MacDonald's brothers and sisters spend their childhood acquainting themselves with petty crimes, dope and the unforgiving code of the streets: never, never snitch. The family dodges real and figurative bullets and seems to be getting on until, halfway through the book, members start dropping as if it's the last act of Hamlet. Davey, a schizophrenic, jumps to his death from a rooftop. Frankie, a promising young prizefighter, is shot dead while trying to rob an armored car. Kevin, a drug dealer, is found suspiciously hanged outside his jail cell. Sister Kathy, a serious pill popper, is shoved off a roof and badly crippled; and 13-year-old Steven is convicted, though eventually acquitted on appeal, of shooting a friend.

With its probes of crooked politicians, bad cops and layers of racism, All Souls easily breaks its regional and ethnic boundaries. It should be harder to automatically think "black" when the euphemism "inner city" pops up again. Perhaps that is why MacDonald was heckled by Southies at a recent book reading in Boston. Hearing the shock of recognition is almost always a sign that the writer got it right.

--By R.Z. Sheppard