SOURCE: "Angela's Second Boy," in New York Times Book Review, July 5, 1998, pp. 5N-5L.

[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...