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Summary
Summary
A deeply funny and affecting memoir about a great escape from a childhood of poverty Joe Queenan's acerbic riffs on movies, sports, books, politics, and many of the least forgivable phenomena of pop culture have made him one of the most popular humorists and commentators of our time. In Closing Time Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and personal topic: his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Closing Time recounts Queenan's Irish Catholic upbringing in a family dominated by his erratic father, a violent yet oddly charming emotional terrorist whose alcoholism fuels a limitless torrent of self-pity, railing, destruction, and late-night chats with the Lord Himself. With the help of a series of mentors and surrogate fathers, and armed with his own furious love of books and music, Joe begins the long flight away from the dismal confines of his neighborhood--with a brief misbegotten stop at a seminary--and into the wider world. Queenan's unforgettable account of the damage done to children by parents without futures and of the grace children find to move beyond these experiences will appeal to fans of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr, and will take its place as an autobiography in the classic American tradition.
Author Notes
Joe Queenan was born November 3, 1950. The author of five previous books, Joe Queenan is a contributing editor at GQ and writes a column, "Good Fences," for The New York Times. He lives in Tarrytown, New York.
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Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Humorist and pop culture writer Queen-an (Queenan Country) turns the mirror on himself in this somber and funny memoir about life with father in the projects of Philadelphia. Queenan closes the chapter on his life with a verbally and physically abusive alcoholic father. Queenan's father was a pugnacious drunk who declaimed passages from great literature and often chatted loudly late at night with God. Early in the memoir, Queenan expresses the searingly honest sentiment that becomes the refrain of the book: "I never forgave my father for the way he treated us." Queenan spent most of his life trying to get away from this father; he found refuge in the public library, and for at least a year ran off to a seminary with the intention of joining the priesthood. After his father's death, as he was casting about for some way to put a spin on their relationship, Queenan recalls that acting as a stenographer for his father-who in his drunken rages would reel off letters to the editor about various social injustices-was the moment when the thought of making a living as a writer first entered his head. Unsentimental and brutally honest, Queenan's memoir captures the pathos of growing up in a difficult family and somehow getting beyond it. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After eviscerating everyone from filmmakers to sports fans, cultural critic and humorist Queenan takes the hatchet to himself in this memoir of growing up poor in Philadelphia. The book is dominated by Queenan's Irish Catholic father, the lunatic-in-chief who routinely loses several jobs per year and takes out his frustrations with copious amounts of booze and violent strappings of his brood. It is this relationship that frames the rest of Queenan's youth, from the part-time job supervisors who become surrogate fathers to the misguided stab at seminary school as a means to escape the belt. Along the way, Queenan catalogs poverty with a specificity that is nearly exhausting; there's no romance here, only the banal and frequently hilarious chronicling of the indignity of off-brand Fig Newtons and generic versions of hit records. Queenan never met a synonym he didn't like (in under three pages, a jail is a hoosegow, calaboose, slammer, and pokey), but this loquaciousness evokes the ludicrous nature of his upbringing while providing humor few others could bring to such dark material. As is often the case with memoirs, Queenan's latter years are less riveting, but his adolescence will have readers crying tears of both sorrow and hilarity.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHETHER you think of Joe Queenan as refreshingly blunt or too mean for his own good, his 10 th book is likely to intensify your opinion. In "Closing Time," he writes with his usual caustic finesse, this time about growing up Irish and poor in Philadelphia in the 1950s and '60s. He serves as an altar boy, moves into and out of a housing project, spends a year in a seminary and three more at Cardinal Dougherty High School. He works in a haberdashery, a drugstore, a bubble-gum factory. His band specializes in "Bar Mitzvah Acid Folk," at least until he falls in love with a doomed young woman who introduces him to classical music. Before he arrives at college, his education is overseen by belligerent priests. One spends each Saturday afternoon "updating us on how useless we were" and acting "as if he was getting ready to slug somebody." Another is the same person to whom Queenan and his classmates must confess their sins - not through the screen of a confessional, either, but in a brightly lighted room. Yet the priests and the poverty, the girls and the music, are almost beside the point, amusing as Queenan's accounts of them are. From first page to last, "Closing Time" is a book about living with a drunken, violently abusive father, a man who routinely beats his son and daughters. These are not hard spankings in response to childish transgressions but brutal attacks provoked by alcohol and low self-esteem. Joe Queenan Sr. left school in the ninth grade, joined the Army, brawled with M.P.'s when denied passes to attend his parents' funerals and served three years in a military prison; his job prospects withered. His son duly considers these and other mitigating factors, but he does not accept them as excuses for the beatings. Fifty years later, we can feel Queenan's rage as he describes yet another "ritualistic act of stripping your offspring and whipping them across the buttocks and thighs with a thick leather belt so that they scream and plead and bleed and stay marked for days and wish both you and they were dead." Queenan's mother is spared the beatings, but she hates her husband for meting them out. Still, she does little to protect her children. By the time Queenan reaches adolescence, his father's "continued existence threatened ours." Brother and sisters agree: "We wanted him dead or we wanted him gone. The only positive thing he could do for us now was to walk in front of a truck or slit his own throat." The beatings go on until Joe Jr., 16 and six feet tall, summons the gumption to throw a counterpunch. Mother and sisters break up the fight, but the axis of the family has tilted. "For obvious reasons," Queenan writes, "this made him dangerous." Until he moves out to attend college, he never goes to bed without a chair jammed against the door and a butcher knife next to his bed. "I never slept well in my father's house again. And I never turned my back on him." Their final blowup leads to the son making a halfhearted suicide attempt, using pills. "Closing Time" allows both reader and author to see how the violent joylessness of the father, together with that of some of the priests, has fueled Queenan's penchant for contempt. Of a pharmacist who employs him as a teenager, who introduces him to New York City and whom he genuinely admires, he feels compelled to write: "His gait suggested that of an oversized gnome, advancing with weird little prancing steps, like a timid dancing bear. . . . The composite image - beer gut, surgical jacket, chrome dome, Kool filters, Tilley hat - was not an attractive package." Joe Queenan and his sister Ree with their Aunt Cassie in 1957. There's no denying that Queenan's prose can be scabrously entertaining, though he is usually funnier at the length of the essay, where the mockery has less time to congeal into bile or mere shtick. Yet "Closing Time" doesn't need to be especially funny to work. The author is struggling to defuse an unexploded bomb in his psyche. We don't need to laugh while we watch. Along the way, Queenan marries an Englishwoman and starts a family. He quits drinking and apparently forgoes even spanking their children. By his early 40 s, he has a lucrative career writing columns and books. His dream, "to make a living by ridiculing people," has come true. During a rare family visit, his aging fa- ther takes him aside to apologize: "One of the things I've learned through Alcoholics Anonymous is that you have to admit that you've hurt people and let them know how sorry you are." Queenan is having none of it, though. "I did not have it in me to forgive him," he writes, "but I shook his hand anyway, if only because this creepy vignette made me uncomfortable and I wanted it to be over." To him, this is blackmail: "Accepting the proffered apology was de rigueur, for without it, the penitent substance abuser might relapse, if only out of disappointment at being denied absolution." The entire country has gone soft, he believes, granting blanket absolution to alcoholics merely "because they professed to be powerless before their addiction." In a column for Newsweek, he excoriates A.A. and his father. Booze is much less addictive than cocaine or nicotine, he argues, yet people are expected to rid themselves of those habits or face the consequences. "Everyone who put a glass of liquor to his lips knew exactly what he was doing; it was not like coming down with malaria because you'd strayed into the wrong jungle." He goes so far as to make a film, "Twelve Steps to Death," scoffing at AA.'s core approach. Not long afterward, his father's health starts to fail. Mrs. Queenan has kicked him out, and he's landed in a flophouse. When word reaches Joe, he takes out his checkbook and moves his father into a decent apartment. Otherwise, though, he treats him with "the offhanded malice that had by this point become my livelihood." When a trait he so loathes in his father has become his own stock in trade, how can he not pony up? There will be truces near the end, but when the family attends the old man at his deathbed, there is precious little warmth or nostalgia. Two of his daughters consider their father "beyond redemption," and their mother refuses, for herself and tiiose daughters, to be listed in the obituary. The son feels neither love nor respect; he is there only because "having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son." Three years later, the anniversary of Joe Sr.'s death passes unnoticed. "My father was dead," Queenan writes, "and I did not miss him." Who, having been beaten by this man scores of times, would feel differently? Irish Catholic poverty caused by paternal drunkenness was tackled 13 years ago by Frank McCourt in "Angela's Ashes," which Queenan, almost alone among the book-buying public, found "unreadable," perhaps because of its climate of forgiveness. No children are whipped in that memoir, yet three of them the as a result of Malachy McCourt's persistent intoxication. Whether Joe Queenan's take on the subject is bracingly unsentimental or more than a little mean-spirited may depend on each reader's own father. Until Queenan moved out, he never went to bed without a chair jammed against the door and a knife nearby. James McManus is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." His new book, "Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker," will be published in October.
Guardian Review
In The Education of Henry Adams (1918), one of the greatest modern autobiographies, Henry Adams observed: "Although everyone cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, everyone must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbours have managed to carry theirs." Some persons today are immoderately interested in their neighbours, but others are correspondingly repelled by the solipsism and egotism of our mania for self-exposure. Faced with another Atlas bearing a world of pain, we may start to do the shrugging ourselves. This problem is compounded when the author - and therefore subject - is the satirist Joe Queenan, who has made a career out of shrugging in the face of others' angst, and cutting the self-important down to size. Closing Time is Queenan's account of his impoverished blue-collar childhood in Philadelphia, in a household dominated by a viciously abusive father who fell into a spiral of drinking and downward social mobility, dragging his "emotionally inert" wife and four helpless children with him. Queenan understands that his father's aggression related to deprivation and disempowerment: "If he could not cast a shadow over the world, he would cast one over his family. And so he did. He beat us often and he beat us savagely. He beat us individually and he beat us together. The worst beatings were when he got spectacularly bombed, came unmoored from reality, and grasped the belt by the wrong end. Then the metal flange would wrap around my thighs and flail against my penis and testicles." Aware how quickly causes become excuses, Queenan sarcastically dismisses his father's endless self-exculpation: "No one in the history of urban misfortune had ever experienced more setback, emotional trauma, and all-purpose injustice than our very own Quaker City Jean Valjean." Queenan Sr by no means had an easy life: as a child he was both shot in the head and, in a separate incident, implicated in his baby sister's mysterious death. He had no formal schooling past the ninth grade, survived the Depression and became a soldier in the second world war, only to go awol for his parents' funeral, serve three years in military prison and be dishonourably discharged. After that his career prospects were nil; he married a woman who informed him on their wedding night that she didn't love him and settled into a life of bitterness, brutality and booze from which his children barely escaped. The violence of the current memoir trend has desensitised us; as audiences, we are jaded shock-connoisseurs, seeking the next thrill. So at first it is a relief that Queenan refuses to pander, saying matter-of-factly that he was beaten, and leaving it at that. But except for that harrowing detail about the flange, for the most part he simply repeats the word "beating" until it becomes generic and indistinct. Similarly, his family never really come to life: he tells us that his father could be charming, but never shows his charm; he insists that his sisters also wanted their father dead, but as he barely characterises them, this collective consciousness doesn't always convince. Much more informative are his descriptions of white working-class poverty in America during the "prosperous" 1950s. Remembering nights left gnawing on uncooked pasta as his father got drunk in another tavern, Queenan remarks: "Poor children do not dream of Croesian wealth, tri umph, vindication, or revenge. They dream of Cheerios." That may be, but Closing Time is unmistakably a tale of triumph, vindication and revenge. Although Queenan proffers no olive branches, he carefully gives credit to the three things that he believes sustained him: the Catholic church, the generosity of a few adults, and the public library. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a priest; as a teenager, he discovered girls, renounced the priesthood and was cared for by two eccentric shopkeepers who hired him after school, giving him much-needed cash, attention and even food. Meanwhile he won scholarships and prizes, taunted his father with his increasing access to the trappings of success and, after a particularly ugly encounter, swallowed several bottles of pills while at his uncle's house. He tells us that his father phoned to apologise, and then, presumably realising his son's state, called an ambulance. This is one of several moments that throw the book off-balance. Suddenly the father who veers between indifference and cruelty is expressing contrition and concern; although Queenan never pauses in his account, to the reader it seems immensely out of character. Were there other moments of decency that have been overlooked? Queenan refuses the easy absolution his father requests as part of a belated and short-lived stint with Alcoholics Anonymous. For those who have endured abuse, the "request" for absolution can feel like just another moment of emotional coercion in a lifetime of bullying. Being told to forgive on demand means that once again the victim must bend to the will of the abuser. No wonder Queenan preferred not to. Unlike Queenan, Said Sayrafiezadeh is forgiving to a fault - indeed, of every fault. Sayrafiezadeh is the youngest son of an Iranian father and a Jewish mother from upstate New York, who found common cause early in their marriage by joining the Socialist Workers Party. Sayrafiezadeh's title, When Skateboards Will Be Free , is taken from his mother's response to his childhood plea for a $10.99 skateboard: come the revolution, she declares, skateboards will be free. Sadly, as even she recognises that the revolution isn't around the corner, this amounts to telling him he'll get his skateboard when hell freezes over. When Sayrafiezadeh was nine months old, his father walked out. Soon his two elder siblings followed, for reasons he never makes clear. The father, neglectful, self-important and so unworldly that many years later he orders chardonnay to impress his son and is confused when it's white, asks Sayrafiezadeh's mother not to divorce him so that he won't lose his visa. Her compliance with this outrageous request is, unfortunately, characteristic. Unable to toss out her politics with her husband, she decides that poverty is a political statement, and takes her bewildered son to live in the slums. When he is four, she leaves him with a "comrade" she barely knows, blindly trusting in the benevolence of fellow socialists. The "comrade" molests him; when she reports it, the party is indifferent. For most of the memoir, she seems pretty indifferent, too, except when she is inculcating him with her politics. However, Sayrafiezadeh has clearly forgiven her - and his father, whom he continues to regard with amused affection and respect. His mother is considerably more sympathetic; she meant well, and her depression is so evident that even she eventually recognises it. Having taught her son that "we must do away with capitalism in order to do away with suffering", she finally realises that socialism might have something to do with suffering, as well. Skateboards is a compassionate, funny and clear-sighted account of an unusual childhood; Sayrafiezadeh recognises the delusional aspects of his parents but is safe enough to smile at them, and never admits anger. Queenan admits little else. But both books are enlightening accounts of the ways in which we are all, to some extent, casualties of our own childhoods. Caption: article-queenan.1 This problem is compounded when the author - and therefore subject - is the satirist Joe Queenan, who has made a career out of shrugging in the face of others' angst, and cutting the self-important down to size. Closing Time is Queenan's account of his impoverished blue-collar childhood in Philadelphia, in a household dominated by a viciously abusive father who fell into a spiral of drinking and downward social mobility, dragging his "emotionally inert" wife and four helpless children with him. Aware how quickly causes become excuses, Queenan sarcastically dismisses his father's endless self-exculpation: "No one in the history of urban misfortune had ever experienced more setback, emotional trauma, and all-purpose injustice than our very own Quaker City Jean Valjean." Queenan Sr by no means had an easy life: as a child he was both shot in the head and, in a separate incident, implicated in his baby sister's mysterious death. He had no formal schooling past the ninth grade, survived the Depression and became a soldier in the second world war, only to go awol for his parents' funeral, serve three years in military prison and be dishonourably discharged. After that his career prospects were nil; he married a woman who informed him on their wedding night that she didn't love him and settled into a life of bitterness, brutality and booze from which his children barely escaped. Unlike Queenan, Said Sayrafiezadeh is forgiving to a fault - indeed, of every fault. Sayrafiezadeh is the youngest son of an Iranian father and a Jewish mother from upstate New York, who found common cause early in their marriage by joining the Socialist Workers Party. Sayrafiezadeh's title, When Skateboards Will Be Free , is taken from his mother's response to his childhood plea for a $10.99 skateboard: come the revolution, she declares, skateboards will be free. Sadly, as even she recognises that the revolution isn't around the corner, this amounts to telling him he'll get his skateboard when hell freezes over.
Kirkus Review
The waggish blue-collar Philly scribe (Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, 2004, etc.) ornaments his tough-childhood memoir with the sort of fancy writing natural to authors of Hibernian extraction. The Queenan family, never in the chips, had a hardscrabble life in the scruffy Irish-American precincts of the City of Brotherly Love. Love was scant. Mom was a terrible cook, and Father was a terrible drunk. The youngster's life was one of ongoing deprivation and off-brand merchandise in various tatterdemalion parishes. Queenan and his sisters couldn't wait to vacate their hostile family encampments on the wrong side of the Schuylkill River. At 13, the besieged lad believed he had an ecclesiastical vocation, but after one year at Maryknoll Junior Seminary he abandoned the cloth. So it was on to Catholic high school, then a Catholic college. He found surrogate fathers, first in a colorful dry-goods merchant who ran a kind of urban emporium, replete with picaresque clientele, next in an oddball apothecary. Further forming his persona were various part-time jobs, including the midnight shift at a bubblegum mill. Scrambling out of the proletariat, Queenan discovered art, music and Paris. He became a man of letters, but even after he achieved his dream ("to make a living by ridiculing people") he was still haunted by a lifelong enemyhis father. Queenan p're, his son recounts, was brutal and mean, no credit to any 12-step program. The text, mostly credible, is naturally infused with the Celtic gift of gab, garnished with grand displays of highfalutin lexicon. Loquacious and rococo, it is populated by congresses of poltroons and excoriates many mangy nincompoops. Evidently Queenan resorts to his venerable thesaurus in an attempt to channel that heathen Mencken's lexical cantrips. Fortunately, the adverbial and adjectival antics work, and the flashes of characteristic caustic wit are accompanied by some truly sweet spots. Close to home and heart, this portrait of the artist shows Queenan at the top of his formhis best yet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist and humorist Queenan's (Queenan Country) touching and funny memoir begins by focusing on his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. He grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father, whose destructive behavior prompted the author to be different from his father and find a better life for himself elsewhere. What gave him hope when he was young was the Catholic Church, the affection of his relatives, and the local public library. Queenan discovers his path out through perseverance and inspirational father figures. At an early age, he embraces his great love of books and music and considers a career in the seminary. Queenan's early memories of typing up his father's drunken rants on social issues so his father could send them to newspaper editors lead him to try a writing career after his father's death. This honest memoir is a great read and will captivate readers who have dealt with family tragedies. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Susan McClellan, Shaler North Hills Lib., Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 The Man on the Roof | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Sin City | p. 20 |
| Chapter 3 The Predicament | p. 51 |
| Chapter 4 Domine, Non Sum Dignus | p. 83 |
| Chapter 5 Semper Fidelis | p. 106 |
| Chapter 6 The Parting of the Reed Sea | p. 152 |
| Chapter 7 Twilight of the Apothecaries | p. 185 |
| Chapter 8 C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre | p. 213 |
| Chapter 9 Second Fiddle | p. 235 |
| Chapter 10 Management Potential | p. 249 |
| Chapter 11 Walkabout | p. 284 |
| Chapter 12 Closing Time | p. 315 |
| Epilogue | p. 334 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 339 |
