The risk Frank McCourt took in writing "Angela's Ashes," and committing his Irishness to the written page was clear the moment the reader picked up a copy of The New Yorker in 1996 where the first installment appeared.

Not, this: The drinking father. The bullying schoolmaster. The hoary continuation of the battle over whether deValera or Collins was the truer patriot. The inevitable dead sibling was found in his cold, Limerick bed.

Yes, all of this. It worked -- the spare, childlike prose that won him The Prize, the one that guarantees every writer the first three words in his obituary:

Pulitzer Prize winner Frank McCourt died yesterday at 78, a once obscure New York high school teacher whose hellish childhood haunted him for six decades before, weary of being angry at the missed joys and landed blows, he wrote it down with such bemused dispassion no outsider could look in on it without admiration.

"The happy childhood is hardly worth your while," he explained at the outset. He set about delivering that value.

The reason it was so easy to miss the brilliance of that book was its startling authenticity. Anyone with an Irish background -- that is to say, a poor, angry and fatalistic view of things -- has heard this dialogue:

"Up the middle aisle," said Jimmy.

"You shut up," said Delia.

That's the McCourt cousins instructing his father, Malachy, to marry the woman he has gotten in the family way.

Read aloud, it is wholly the stuff of the Irish. He did what Patrick Kavanagh, another Irishman who must be sung aloud, described as "striking a true note on a slack string."

That is the essence of the Irish identity: the fecklessness and approximation that, narrowed down at the end, somehow results in a name that encapsulates it all. Just consider the author's own name, as created by a father incapable of saying what he meant:

"He thought he might name the child Malachy after himself, but his North of Ireland accent and the alcoholic mumble confused the clerk so much he simply entered the name 'male' on the certificate."

Male, ultimately, was named Frank -- after his grandfather and, of course, the sweet saint of Assisi.

When the family reverse-emigrated from New York to Limerick, the elder McCourt's drinking overtook the family. Angela McCourt took to begging. Frank, a rheumy-eyed child whose schooling ended before his teens, accumulated the bitter sense-memory that would come spilling out in his later years at a time things Irish took on an irresistible cachet.

This made him at once famous in America and resented in Ireland. "We are a nation of begrudgers," one Irish writer said long ago. This is true. Every time an Irishman succeeds his friends die a little bit. To read the Irish press as Mr. McCourt became famous was to listen in on the runners up at a dance audition.

Professional Irishman. How could he remember the dialogue verbatim? That's not the Limerick we knew. He had libeled a schoolmate named by recounting a moment when he confessed to spying on his naked sister. Turns out the fellow didn't have a sister.

Details, so many years later, are the things that trip us up. A man named Gerry Hannan devoted himself to disproving Mr. McCourt's every word, calling him a liar, a defamer, a fantasist. Errant details aside, Mr. McCourt had committed the unpardonable act among expatriate Irish writers: he wrote like an Irishman.

Find the Irishness, for instance, in George Bernard Shaw or Samuel Beckett. James Joyce masked his behind a prose so impenetrable as to be deniable as a testament to ethnicity. And for all that, he made a point of staying clear of Dublin once he'd described it.

Mr. McCourt came back. And on that most Irish of institutions, the Late Late Show on RTE, he tried mightily to plug his book about his life in America, a slender tome called 'Tis.

Gerry Hannan, born long after Mr. McCourt fled Limerick, showed up in the audience and shouted "liar" and picked away at the preceding book and accused the author of slandering his own childhood.

The row, bitter, personal, wholly Irish in its vindictiveness, set the studio audience clapping merrily.

"I'm not sure who the audience are applauding, by the way," the host noted.

In America, where readers are not afraid to love an Irishman for himself, there would have been no doubt.

Exit Angela McCourt's son. And cue the applause.