Independant Reading Blog#5: 'Tis - Plot

'Tis, the second book in Frank McCourt's trilogy of memoirs begins with the author landing in New York as an eighteen year-old. McCourt arrives by ship, and in the company of a priest, who helps McCourt get established in his new city. The priest then departs for his Californian parish, leaving McCourt after an uncomfortable occurence in their hotel the previous night.
The priest is one of the many characters that populate McCourt's memoir, which spans from McCourt's 1949 New York arrival, till roughly 1985, the year McCourt's father died. In between, we follow Frank McCourt through the prime years of his life, which he spends thinking about girls, hopping from job to job, and trying to get an education to move himself up in the world. McCourt starts off working at the Biltmore Hotel, before joing the American Army and serving in Europe as a dog trainer and company clerk. When he returns, he goes through stints working in the docks and warehouses of New York harbour and goes through some training at an insurance company. Eventually, he attends social science classes at NYU, and upon graduation, he settles into a teaching job at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. He teaches for more than thirty years in Manhattan's public school system.
Throughout his life, McCourt is forced through frequent lodging changes, living in every kind of Irish boarding house imaginable, including one run by a Jew. To complicate matters for himself, he is usually chasing after a girl, which often distracts him from his studies. The girl who makes the biggest splash in his life is Alberta "Mike" Small, a fellow student at NYU, who changes the way McCourt thinks about women.
The final scene in the book is at McCourt's father's funeral in Belfast. His mother, Angela, has already died, and his estranged father is the last immediate family he has left in Ireland. As Frank and his youngest brother Alphie travel to Belfast for the funeral, they close an era marked by the gradual migration of the McCourt family to America. The two McCourt brothers are returning to their homeland, now no longer the primary residence of members of their family. This is opposite to the beginning of the book, where Frank McCourt travels on his own to New York, not knowing anybody. The journeys inbetween, particularly that of Frank McCourt, show the migration of a family, through hard work, not only to a new country, but to a much better social and economic standing.