McCourt's recycled school days

Teacher Man
By Frank McCourt
Scribner, 258 pp., $26

Crafting a good memoir is every bit as much work as crafting a novel. It is an act of creation to cull a compelling story out of the chaos of existence. If this work is not done well, the result is not an involving story, but a shapeless, rambling mess of self-aggrandizing anecdotes.

Despite Frank McCourt's previous triumphs crafting memoirs, his ''Teacher Man" begins inauspiciously. In Chapter 1, after summarizing his first two days on the job as a high school teacher, McCourt announces: ''Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City." The reader may feel a certain amount of trepidation about what will fill the remaining pages if this is the case.

Such fears initially seem groundless. McCourt describes the disconnect between his training and the reality of teaching as well as anyone ever has -- ''Professors of education at New York University never lectured on how to handle flying-sandwich situations" -- and his account of his first two days of teaching sings.

But, after the first two days, we reach the ''unremarkable" part of McCourt's career, and ''Teacher Man" goes into a death spiral of tedium. Faced with tough students he doesn't know how to teach, McCourt begins telling them and his readers stories from his childhood. Alas, McCourt has already poured his best childhood material into ''Angela's Ashes," so here, he serves up the dregs: He actually includes a lengthy passage recounting the day his mother bought him a suitcase.

The rest of the memoir continues in this fashion, with scenes from McCourt's teaching interspersed with increasingly ill-chosen, tangentially related anecdotes from his life outside the classroom. What results is a book that fails as both an account of McCourt's teaching and of his life. This is, in large part, because the McCourt depicted in ''Teacher Man" is something of a cipher. The bulk of the anecdotes here are presented with a minimum of reflection or introspection. Indeed, McCourt, the author of three memoirs, includes this rather curious admission: ''There is an activity called 'pulling yourself together.' I tried, but what was there to pull together?" If McCourt has no self, whom exactly is he writing about?

McCourt acknowledges being forced into therapy by his wife, but he doesn't say why he might have needed it, and his sneering account of his group therapy serves only to show his contempt for the other participants. McCourt also recounts an extramarital liaison without explanation. Indeed, he recounts a number of his sexual adventures to no apparent purpose, culminating in a repugnant episode involving a woman he sleeps with despite his hatred for her personality and his disgust at her ''vast, blubbery body." What are we to make of this?

McCourt's stinginess with his thoughts and feelings about his personal life would sit easier if he were a more generous narrator of his teaching career. But here, again, he simply reports events without much commentary. He acts violently against students twice but doesn't stop to tell us whether he feels contrite, whether he thinks these incidents have any bearing on his fitness to teach, or how it feels to act on a teacher's darkest fantasy. When writing about his early career McCourt seems scornful of students, parents, administrators, and his younger self; indeed, his recollections of his first few years of teaching are so sour that they provoke the question of why he kept teaching at all, but this question apparently doesn't interest him.

Of course the author and readers of a memoir may be interested in different facets of the story, but ''Teacher Man" is such a hodgepodge that it's impossible to discern which facets of the story interest McCourt himself.

For some readers, his skill as a prose stylist may be enough to carry ''Teacher Man." He has an undeniable gift for turning a phrase, as in this passage about his post-divorce life: ''I could never tell them how . . . every night I struggled to drown out the sounds of rowdy sailors off freighters and container ships, how I stuffed cotton wool in my ears to muffle the shrieking and laughing of women . . . how the pounding of the juke box in the bar below . . . jolted me nightly in my bed."

Yet as ''Teacher Man" drags on, McCourt's style starts to feel predictable. The inexplicable forays into second-person narration, the Irishisms, the flights of fancy -- we have been here before, and now these seem not innovative storytelling techniques, but gimmicks.

Though only half of ''Teacher Man" is about teaching, McCourt still manages to succumb to the pitfalls that plague most teaching memoirs: He complains about low pay, disrespect, and the idiocy of the administrators, and he renders the students as two-dimensional types in cute dialect. Finally, at the end of the book, McCourt sinks to the most contemptible convention of such memoirs: poaching the interesting or tragic life stories of the students to make the teacher seem more interesting and heroic.

After two wildly successful memoirs, many readers will buy ''Teacher Man" on the strength of McCourt's name. Those looking for an involving story will be disappointed, as will those hoping for a fresh look at teaching. Even those interested in McCourt as a person will find reading this odd, cranky book a frustrating experience.

Brendan Halpin is the author of the novels ''Donorboy" and the forthcoming ''Long Way Back," as well as two memoirs, including one about teaching.