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Like my father, Frank McCourt grew up dreaming of that gold-paved, sunlit paradise across the ocean where he had been born, and to which he would one day return. "'Tis" is literally the last word of "Angela's Ashes," following and affirming the sentence "'Tis a great country" -- referring, of course, to the United States. This moment of boundless, naive optimism provides both a title and a starting point for the second volume of McCourt's memoir. This book takes its narrator -- his charm, human sympathy and yarn-spinning ability intact -- from his return to New York in 1949 up to the death of his mother, Angela, in the mid-1980s (when Angela's actual ashes finally play a role in her son's story). And while 'tis indeed a strange and in many ways wonderful country this young man encounters, he finds in it almost as much misery as he left behind.

"'Tis" is virtually guaranteed to be a bestseller, but it faces an impossible obstacle in trying to please readers of "Angela's Ashes." It's almost certain to be seen as something of a disappointment.

If childhood presents a clear narrative -- the goal of every child is to survive and escape -- adult life offers no coherent story line, or perhaps too many. "'Tis" thrums with vivid details drawn from McCourt's life as a laborer, soldier, student, husband and teacher. You can count on him to side with the downtrodden, lampoon the powerful, resist the Irish tendency toward racism and closed-mindedness, capture dialogue magnificently and recount comic anecdotes at his own expense. But we're rarely sure why we meet the many characters he encounters as he careens through colorful, mid-century New York, or where exactly he is going.

Most of "'Tis" takes place during the '50s, as McCourt begins the painful immigrant's journey of loss and reinvention. Lonely and uncertain, he works at menial jobs and lives in rooming houses until he is drafted and sent to Germany, and as a result he can visit Limerick in his U.S. Army uniform as that most exotic of creatures, a "returned Yank." An autodidact who has read Dostoyevsky and Melville despite never graduating from high school, McCourt then literally talks his way into New York University's School of Education, choosing his career virtually by chance. He falls in love with a willowy WASP goddess and eventually marries her, although it doesn't work out. (My father did that too -- that's why I'm here.) Then "'Tis" fast-forwards across three decades at breakneck speed, to focus on Angela's last years, when she moves to New York to be near her sons. (It's puzzling that McCourt's several brothers, including the actor and tavern owner Malachy, himself now the author of a memoir, are never more than shadowy, half-formed presences in "'Tis.")

If anything, the doleful, almost aimless quality of "'Tis" seems like a counterbalance to the fable of transcendence told in "Angela's Ashes." The boy in McCourt's first book dreams of leaving Limerick and poverty behind, but the man in his new book discovers that leaving your homeland is not the same as escaping your provenance. "Fifth Avenue tells me how ignorant I am," the adult McCourt reflects during a late-night meander, after his WASP girlfriend has temporarily dumped him. "There are the window mannequins in their Easter garb and if one of them came to life and asked me what kind of fabric she was wearing I wouldn't have a notion. If they wore canvas I'd spot it straight away because of the coal bags I delivered in Limerick and used for cover when they were empty and the weather was desperate ... I could never point to a dress and say that's satin or wool and I'd be lost entirely if challenged to identify damask or crinoline."

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