'Tis - Frank McCourt

I am pleased to announce I am FINALLY done 'Tis by Frank McCourt. I have no idea why it took me so long to read this one. It is only 367 pages, it is interesting, and it is, in large part, related to teaching! Should have been much faster to complete.

I think why it took me so long to read is because I found Frank a frustrating character. Essentially 'Tis details his life in New York from 1949 to 1980(ish). In this period he has several jobs, lives in all types of awful apartments, goes overseas as a soldier, goes to NYU on the GI Bill, gains a long term girlfriend, gets a job teaching, gets married, and has a child. What frustrated me most in the novel was a) his up-and-down relationship with his mother and b) his drinking.

The mother thing I get, this is a real-life story, not a fictionalized account. In real life, not everything winds up happily ever after - not that anything terribly tragic happens in 'Tis. Regardless, I kept hoping for some sort of grand moment of realization and appreciation but it didn't really happen.

The drinking thing I found harder to get past. After reading Angela's Ashes and having a vivid look at the tragedy of Frank's father drinking away all his wages and leaving his family to starve, I was horrified that so much of 'Tis referenced Frank going to the pub, getting drunk, and getting into all sorts of trouble with his family, his wife, and his career. I really wanted Frank to "rise above" and turn down the booze, which I suppose he must have done eventually because he managed to write a Pulitzer-Prize Winning book. Anyway, I found it frustrating.

Overall I enjoyed 'Tis, but I'm left highly undecided about Frank as a person. Clearly he is a good writer. Clearly he tells a tragic story with wit and humour. But at the end of the day, I didn't really sympathize with him. That beign said, I do want to read Teacher Man, his third and final book. Probably more than anything becasue it details his life as a new teacher and that is fairly relevant to my life.

I think it will be awhile before I take one another McCourt book, though.