One of the more cynical explanations for the American success of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is the USA's aversion to filth. A neurotically hygienic nation, which nowadays has serious doubts about handshaking or sharing the communion cup, was allowed by the book to wallow vicariously in the Limerick gutters, dabbling in slops and rat-droppings without getting its hands dirty.
'Tis, the sequel to McCourt's vivid childhood memoir, is a far less mucky affair, as young Frankie lands in New York to work his way up to become the author of Angela's Ashes. We follow the street-wise, poignantly ambitious young author from casual labour in hotels and restaurants to a stint as a GI in Germany, then on to a degree course at New York University and a career in school teaching. It is the American Dream in a Munster idiom, gutsy, racy and remarkably depthless. It is also a very American piece of writing, for all its rollicking Irishisms. The book is written in the artless, lurching sentences favoured by US creative writing classes, with its sub-Hemingwayesque trick of stringing a limitless number of snappy sub-clauses together by recurrent "ands". All 385 pages of 'Tis are couched in a first-person, presenttense, in-your-face style, which aims at graphic immediacy but ends up as wearyingly artificial as neo-classical elegy. Frank McCourt, alarmingly, is beginning to write Frank McCourt books - and though he is superbly good at it, that's only to be expected.
In Angela's Ashes, McCourt was able to get outside his own head, not least because he dealt with kinsfolk who came through as powerful, autonomous characters, in the way a dependent child would see them. Angela's Ashes thus transcended autobiography to become first-rate fiction. It had a fictional shapeliness about it, which the blow-by-blow narrative of 'Tis lamentably lacks. Behind its bagginess lies a romantic, very American belief in the authenticity of all experience - the point of art is to tell it like it is, catch the moment in all its innocent rawness. Form, for this puritan aesthetic, is a kind of falsification. Art is a report, not a reflection; indeed McCourt hardly ever halts his headlong life-story to discern a pattern or meditate on meaning. In this autobiographical mode, things are significant just because they happen to you. But in that case every bit of experience seems as meaningful as every other, and there can be no real criteria of selection, as another overbulky Irish writer, Laurence Sterne, discovered to his ironic dismay. There is an American ingenuousness about McCourt's uncrafted style, which comes through just as much in his vision of the New World. Frankie is that old American stereotype, the innocent abroad, the gullible ingenu avid for experience. In the hands of a Henry James, this innocence is likely to turn sinisterly sour; in McCourt's more typically upbeat American vein, it will eventually triumph. The scabby-eyed urchin who steps off the boat from Cork will finally evolve into the autobiographer of 'Tis, profitably reporting his scabby-eyedness to the world.
FRANKIE'S childlike consciousness has its arch appeal, but McCourt milks this vein of credulous whimsy for more than it will yield. Young Frankie is too predictably starry-eyed and openmouthed, and the raciness is never very far from sentimentalism. The book's monosyllabic title is also the last word of Angela's Ashes, and is meant to affirm the belief that America is a fine place to be. So it can be, not least for down-at-heel Irish immigrants turned university graduates. But few readers of this book would suspect that the place is far from fine for a growing sector of its criminalised, impoverished citizens. McCourt doesn't look sufficiently beyond his own all-absorbing experience to register such bleak truths.
Angela's Ashes is not, in fact, appealing just for its muckiness. If there is a touch of literary deja vu about its seedy Irish landscapes, there is also a complex human tragedy at work in the book. 'Tis, by contrast, confirms the prejudice that success stories don't make for major art. The less impoverished Frankie grows, the less interesting he becomes. A mild dash of tragedy might not have come amiss, from a literary if not a human viewpoint. There is a poignant depth to Angela's Ashes that this curiously two-dimensional memoir, with its too-easily consumable style, cannot rival. Without that bitter human drama, McCourt's writing falls too readily into a vein of Irish jauntiness which was already overworked by the time Sean O'Casey completed his memoirs, and which Behan gave a hefty kick towards the grave.
Producing a triumphant first book is always a curse in disguise. Will it turn out to be a Catch-22? Will all your subsequent work wilt in its ominous shadow? McCourt, however, will not become a great author by matching Angela's Ashes time and again. He will do so when he writes a work as moving and powerful, which has absolutely no connection with his autobiographical experience.
Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford University. His recent books include Crazy John and the Bishop and other Essays on Irish Culture and The Truth About the Irish