Superficially, " ‘Tis" is the classic immigrant’s tale. As a dockworker, a soldier, a student on the GI Bill and then as a teacher in the New York City schools, McCourt is always a young man with his face pressed against the window of life. He is eaten up with envy at the success of others, and he is forever falling into the chasm between what he thinks life ought to be and what it really is. The only salve for his disappointment is an indomitable sense of humor. During the Korean War, Corporal McCourt spends a furlough visiting his family in Limerick. He expects to be hailed as the conquering Yank in his splendid uniform. Instead, he finds himself treated as nothing more than little Frankie all grown up but still with the same bad eyes. At a dance he ponders the idea of faking a limp to gain sympathy and finally finds a partner, but “when she gets up I notice she has a limp and that puts me in a quandary wondering if I should postpone my own limp.” Humor and heartbreak, for McCourt, are indivisible.
" ‘Tis" is a melting-pot story where nothing melts. It is also a closely observed portrait of New York City at midcentury. But more than that, it is the story of a man finding two great vocations–teaching and storytelling–and he wins our trust by never touching up his memories. He tells of walking out on his 8-year-old daughter the way his father walked out on him. When his mother died, he found he could not cry. A harsh judge of others, he is toughest on himself.
As a college student, McCourt wrote a couple of stories about his childhood in Ireland. The professor loved them, the girls in class cried, but McCourt vowed never to do it again. “If I go on writing about my miserable childhood they’ll say, Stop, stop, life is hard enough, we have our own troubles. So, from now on, I’ll write stories about my family moving to the suburbs of Limerick where everyone is well fed and clean from taking a bath at least once a week.” Watching him discover over the course of this book how wrong he was that day is the great pleasure of " ‘Tis," a hard-nosed but lyrical conclusion to the story begun in “Angela’s Ashes.”
