[In the following review, Conroy looks at the strengths and weaknesses of A Monk Swimming.]

The extraordinary public success of Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, was due no doubt in some small measure to good luck—the temper of the times being unusually receptive to memoir—but much more, I think, because it was a closely observed, beautifully written, esthetically satisfying rendering of an exotic world of a particular kind of poverty: that is, white, Irish poverty, which for most American readers had up until then been pretty much an abstraction. Frank McCourt struggled for many years with this material, and finally succeeded when he discovered the voice of the boy. The ability to balance that voice with the calm, almost invisible voice of the adult author allowed him to move past abstraction to the personal, the particular and the real.

At the moment, post-Titanic, there seems to be a heightened interest in things Irish, particularly Irish music, of course, but also the whole notion of Irishness. Malachy McCourt, Frank's slightly older brother, must have decided or been coerced to decide that the time was right to step forward and have a go himself. Another memoir.

Malachy McCourt came to the United States in 1952, when he was 20 years old, without money, without education and without a trade. After two years in the Army—a period he does not deal with in his book—he returned to New York and became a professional Irishman, for which he can hardly be blamed. His Irishness was all he had.

Chronologically speaking, A Monk Swimming begins where Angela's Ashes ended. It is set mostly in New York City and describes, through anecdotes, jokes, tall tales and the like, Malachy's rise through the East Side Irish subculture as bartender, actor, house Paddy for "The Tonight Show," stud and all-around charmer. He was a big-chested, bearded, handsome silver-tongued lad from Limerick, and New York ate him up. Simpler times in the 1950's, certainly, and plenty of money from the postwar boom. Malachy in any case was bursting with energy, free at last from the soul-deadening poverty of his childhood. Putting up nothing but his name, he entered into partnership with two businessmen and opened Malachy's, which, as luck would have it, became the first singles bar in the city.

Party time! What tremendous excitement for a young man from nowhere. To be in, to be connected to the action, drinking with the likes of R. J. Reynolds III, George Hamilton, Warren Beatty, Grace Kelly and Gig Young. How amazing to be hanging out with Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Alan Bates, Richard Harris and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

(Some 15 years later, 30 blocks north, a similar sort of thing happened to me and a few literary friends as our favorite bar got discovered and all sorts of powerful and famous people clamored to get in. We were in seventh heaven. There's Jackie O! There's the Mayor! There's Paul Desmond, Dick Cavett, William Styron, Lauren Bacall, Jack Lemmon! The illusion—particularly in one's 20's and 30's—is that one has arrived at the honeyed center of the Big Apple. It's a powerful dynamic, a drug, almost. One must stay till 3 in the morning. I personally wasted almost 10 years on such nonsense. It was fun, of course, but it was a complete waste of time and energy. I wasn't at the center of anything. There wasn't any center.)

So young Malachy was understandably in thrall to New York—acting with the Irish Players, barhopping, chasing the girls, tearing around, working long hours more often than not and fueling it all with alcohol. Many things happened to him. He got married, had children and drank more and more:

One problem I had with alcohol was the fact that, beyond a mild feeling of debilitation, 'twas a rare time I'd experience "hangovers," as they are called. If you are going to ingest the toxin, then 'tis well after having extracted the benefits of inebriation to dispose of that lethal leftover waste. So, before retiring, I would find a convenient porcelain altar, bend the knees to the floor, and do the reverse of Communion, in that it is better to regurgitate than to receive.

Some readers will be amused by the tone, the "Irish" humor. Most of A Monk Swimming is written in such a tone, which I take not to be Irish at all, but an imitation of an American stereotype of Irish:

I proceeded to the bar amidst the hub and the bub of satisfied diners, who were happily inhaling the fumes of cognac and the satisfying smoke of the coffin nails. Others were eagerly awaiting the slab of decomposing meat or the body of the deceased and battered denizen of the sea, whose odoriferous fumes were doused by the judicious employment of sherry, shallots and garlic.

To my mind a little of this goes a long way. If it strikes the reader as funny, so much the better, but to me it sounds like W. C. Fields falling flat. What makes reading page after page of this malarkey particularly irritating is the fact that when he wants to, when he buckles down and tries hard, Malachy McCourt is capable of writing well, as in a quick section describing getting drunk the first lime at the age of 11 and in the final two pages of the book, containing a fantasy about his father. There are distinct Hashes here and there of real writing, but many more pages of hiding behind the dated, artificially constructed persona of the blowhard Irishman.

So the booze, not surprisingly, brought young Malachy down. His marriage broke up, his welcome at the pubs grew frosty and he fell into a period of globe-trotting as a gold smuggler, a hard-drinking, two fisted, whore-chasing mule carrying gold bars in a specially designed body vest from Zurich to India. The exotic material is presented in the Paddy voice and never quite breaks through with any force.

Well, perhaps I am being too harsh. No doubt many people will enjoy A Monk Swimming for what it is, the freewheeling anecdotes and memories of a charming rascal. But the voice is not Irish in any meaningful sense. In his acknowledgments McCourt thanks "the English for stuffing their language down our throats so that we could regurgitate it in glorious colors." Who is the "we"? Is the "we" supposed to be Irish writers? Does it refer, for instance, to the extraordinary delicacy and nuance of Sean O'Faolain? The subtlety and gentle wit of someone like Frank O'Connor? Other literary artists from that magical island? If so, it is presumptuous, because in terms of Irishness, or the Irish voice, if such a thing can be said to exist, McCourt is writing parody.

Memoirs to the left of us. Memoirs to the right of us. A blizzard of memoirs good, bad and indifferent. But as the writer Deborah Eisenberg points out, the task is not primarily to have a story, "but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk—that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure its essence. In other words the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative."

Truer words were never spoke.