Teacher Man

By Frank McCourt

Published by Scribner

Review by Mike Farragher

One of the things that make Frank McCourt such an endearing writer is the lack of pretension in his voice. He can coax the strongest emotions from basic words and sentence structures.

Angela’s Ashes deftly described the ache of Irish poverty and leavened it with humour in a clear-eyed style that made him the toast of the literati.

In one of the many quotes from his former students that make up the spine of his new Teacher Man memoir, one finds an explanation behind the author’s success and more importantly, the essence of Frank McCourt, the writer.

“When I told stories about working on the docks they looked at me in a different way,” he writes. “One boy said it was funny to think you had a teacher up there that worked like real people and didn’t come from college just talking books and all.”

You would think that a man who won a Pulitzer Prize for his debut might be tempted to throw around some flowery prose, just to show everyone how learned he is. Not Frank McCourt.

In Teacher Man, McCourt’s writing style is intact; there’s no room for New York Times crossword language when you are this good at telling stories.

In Angela’s Ashes, he had to survive the squalor of a Limerick slum; in Teacher Man, he faced something more treacherous — the unruly spirit of a New York City classroom.

A sandwich is flung at your head and there is nothing in the NYU teacher manual that tells you what to do next, so what is your next move? You eat it, of course.

McCourt’s self-deprecating humour might lead you to believe that he was just trying to survive at the front of the class and was stumbling through in survival mode, but that would discredit the creative educator that undoubtedly changed the course of countless lives during his tenure as a New York City teacher.

McCourt is so passionate about weaving yarns that there are times where you can see spots when he was so engrossed in the story at hand that he leaves off quotation marks when quoting someone for fear that pausing for something as annoying as proper punctuation might ruin the story at hand.

Make no mistake — with McCourt, it’s all about the story. On Teacher Man, he weaves accounts from his childhood that won him the Pulitzer in the first place with his students’ reaction to them. They are dumbfounded that he had no refrigerator or toilet paper in the house, and he describes their shock with his trademark sharp wit.

Some critics have lambasted him for rehashing tales from his Angela’s Ashes days, but I think they are missing the point. The reaction to the harsh realities of an Irish childhood from his students and the emergence of both a teaching style and the character of a man is what makes Teacher Man a truly fresh story.