Probably because it reads like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes on Prozac, this jaunty portrayal of a widowed Irish mother, Agnes, and her seven roustabout kids in the '60s is a best-seller in Ireland and has been turned into a movie starring Anjelica Huston. O'Carroll, the Irish comedian and actor (The Van), writes with a push-me-pull-you garrulousness: One minute he's charming you with the wisecracking intimacy Agnes shares with her children and her best friend, the next he's delivering wince-inducing gag lines built on bathroom humor and unconvincing malaprops. It's refreshing to enter O'Carroll's fun-loving, working-class Dublin world in The Mammy, but in the end, his slapstick quixotism gets the best of him. B-
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