Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (Scribner's, $24). By Margaret Regan EARLY ON IN his searing memoir of his woebegone childhood in Depression-era Ireland, Frank McCourt makes what amounts to a boast. "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," he writes, "and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious, alcoholic father; the pious, defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years." Certainly the rest of McCourt's tragicomic book gives weight to his claim. His early years were so wretched that a reader wonders with awe how he managed even to survive, let alone become a writer whose luminous prose rivals the greatest of the Irish writers. With the skill of a novelist, McCourt, who has lived the whole of his adult life in the United States, lines up the cast of characters he warns us about on the first page. His father, Malachy McCourt, is a former Irish Republican Army man who regularly drinks up the family's dole money. Coming home in the midnight hours singing of lost Irish heroes, he rousts his small sons out of their beds to make them swear to die for Ireland. He has the smell of the drink on him. He has us stand at attention in the kitchen. We are soldiers. He tells us we must promise to die for Ireland. We will, Dad, we will. Angela Sheehan McCourt is the long-suffering Angela of the title, the Catholic wife and mother who must bear whatever ashes the Lord has chosen to heap upon her. And the ashes are many. Angela and Malachy had emigrated separately to the U.S., the ex-IRA man fleeing the Protestant North with a price on his head, Angela departing godforsaken Limerick in the simple hope of a better life. But in Brooklyn what Angela meets up with is the charming Malachy, a singing Irishman with a fatal craving for his pint. After a furtive "knee-trembler," the 16-year-old Angela winds up pregnant and then married in a shotgun wedding. Four years later, with the help of a set of twins, she's the mother of five, struggling to find enough pennies for a pitiful diet of bread and milk and tea. The death of the family's beloved baby daughter provokes the crisis that sends them back to their native land. The heartbroken Malachy disappears for days, weeping into his cups in whatever bar will take him. Angela collapses into her bed, leaving 4-year-old Frank to care for his three little brothers. He improvises as best as he can, stealing bananas from the grocery, sweetening up sour milk with sugar so the twins will drink it. Some kindly neighbors and disapproving cousins finally intervene, and the whole family is packed up and sent back to soggy Ireland. Short on cash, long on contemptuous relatives, they dwell in the slum "lanes" of Limerick, where "the rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges... From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp...The rain drove us into the church--our refuge, our strength, our only dry place...Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain." The damp carries off the baby twins, one at a time, and the remaining family repeats the desperate patterns they perfected back in Brooklyn. On the rare occasions that Malachy finds a job, the mother and children wait anxiously on a Friday night for him to come home with his pay. Young Frank dreams of the fine foods Dad's wages will provide, potatoes and sugar and perhaps a sweet. This lovely hope is only rarely answered. More often than not, the kindly Dad who tells his sons stories, who fills their ears with songs, swills the family's food money at the pubs. The love that young Frank bears for his father is palpable, and it's the most heartbreaking element in his story. He tells his tale in a style that's almost deadpan, from the remembered point of view of a child who for a long time doesn't know that life can be any different than it is. Malachy is a father who loves his children, but he's tragically flawed with what even the Irish call their curse, the taste for alcohol. Angela's Ashes was excerpted in the New Yorker, and it's on The New York Times bestseller list. Like last year's critically acclaimed memoir, The Liars' Club by Mary Karr, it's part of a new genre of tell-all memoirs about the wretched truth of some childhoods. (It's also a timely reminder of the bad old days of life for women and children before welfare strung out its safety net.) Like Karr's book, McCourt's must be in part a work of re-imagining, a fleshing out of the stark outlines of his memory and family stories with plausible dialogue and details. How else to explain McCourt's detailed accounts of his First Holy Communion Day, an hilarious occasion on which he accidentally vomits up God into his grandmother's backyard, or even of his christening? Nevertheless, the book is a work of crystal-clear truths about family, full of gorgeously written distillations of tragedy and comedy. And it sings with the language of the Irish, who have forever endowed the idiom forced upon them by their conquerors with the poetry of their own tongue. Like Nora Joyce, whose verbal pyrotechnics provided her famous husband with a "portable Ireland," McCourt's Malachy and Angela and assorted priests and blackguards live on in this stunning work.

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