Anna Quindlen's column was obviously inspired by a new book, Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt. Today's New York Times ran its review of the book...

'Teacher Man: A Memoir,' by Frank McCourt
The Stuyvesant Test

Review by BEN YAGODA

It was by no means a done deal that you would be reading these words. To review "Teacher Man," I had to read "Teacher Man," and to read "Teacher Man," I had to get my hands on it. This proved challenging because no sooner had the advance copy entered the house than my teenage daughter snatched it and repaired to her room. I thought I had a chance when she was done, but my wife beat me to the punch. I was standing in wait when she turned the last page, and I grabbed the book. My mother-in-law, visiting from out of state, had her eye on it, I knew, but my glare told her she'd have to pry it from my cold, icy hands.

Yes, Frank McCourt, the author of "Angela's Ashes" and " 'Tis," has done it again - distilled from the mash of his life a strong and alluring narrative brew. You start reading, one story leads to the next, and all of a sudden two hours have passed. The wonder is that an entire household would have picked up on that from a set of galley proofs bound in plain blue paper.

"Teacher Man" has less heft than its predecessors in a couple of senses of the word: it is less packed with incident, passion and regret, and it's shorter. But it complements them. More than that: it completes them, with a strong, satisfying and - could it be? - happy ending. Animating the earlier books was a paradoxical tension. These were narratives of the absolutely highest level, richly textured and unputdownable. Yet McCourt depicted himself as tongue-tied and shy and capable of thinking up good comebacks only on the way down the stairs following his many painful encounters. Where did that fellow turn into the great yarn spinner, the Pulitzer Prize winner who stands atop best-seller lists, arms akimbo?

As it turns out, in the classroom. In 1958, 27 years old and a recent graduate of New York University, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, McCourt took a job as an English teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island. On his first day, at the start of his first class, one youth hurled a sandwich at another. All McCourt could think to say was, "Stop throwing sandwiches." A third youth replied (and McCourt's rendition of the patois of New York teenagers is priceless): "Hey, teach, he awredy threw the sangwidge. No use tellin' him now don't throw the sangwidge. They's the sangwidge there on the floor." McCourt writes:

"The sandwich, in wax paper, lay halfway out of the bag and the aroma told me there was more to this than baloney. I picked it up and slid it from its wrapping. It was not any ordinary sandwich where meat is slapped between slices of tasteless white American bread. This bread was dark and thick, baked by an Italian mother in Brooklyn, bread firm enough to hold slices of a rich baloney, layered with slices of tomato, onions and peppers, drizzled with olive oil and charged with a tongue-dazzling relish.

"I ate the sandwich."

The episode was emblematic of his life as a teacher, which would last another 30 years. Admittedly ill equipped for administering the conventional high school curriculum, McCourt conducted his classes with panic-born stealth and cunning: sometimes eating a sandwich, sometimes moderating oddball dialectics, sometimes singing Irish folk songs, sometimes studying the narrative strategy of recipes, nursery rhymes and excuse notes, but most often just telling stories. "My life saved my life," he writes. He recognized from the start that this played into the hands of shrewd classroom veterans who knew you could always avoid the lesson plan by getting the teacher up and rocking on a hobbyhorse. But that didn't matter. He perceived that the best way for his students to learn something was for him to learn something, and the best way to achieve that was to interpret and share his life and hard times. Not that he handed them rehearsed and well-worn yarns; those are dull and unsurprising to speaker and listener alike. No, he told the kind of stories whose paths and endings are a revelation.

McCOURT ended up teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. There his classroom style merged with a conception of writing that was less about putting words on paper than about active observing and imagining: "Every moment of your life, you're writing. Even in your dreams you're writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. . . . You see someone you like and you say, Hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head."

McCourt retired from Stuyvesant in the late 80's, in part because of a nagging rhetorical question: "Who was I to talk about writing when I had never written a book never mind published one?" His one, two and now three masterly memoirs show that he learned his own lessons well. "Teacher Man" is an irresistible valedictory, about a man finding his voice in the classroom, on the page and in his soul.

Ben Yagoda is the author, most recently, of "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing." He has just finished a book on the parts of speech.

---