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Overview
An affecting memoir from one of America's most provocative humorists
Over the past two decades, Joe Queenan has established himself as a scourge of everything that is half-baked, half-witted, and halfhearted in American culture. In Closing Time, Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and a more 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, alcoholic father, and his long flight away from the dismal confines of his neighborhood into the greater, wide world. A story about salvation and escape, Closing Time has at its heart the makings of a classic American autobiography.
Synopsis
A deeply funny and affecting memoir about a great escape from a childhood of poverty.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Joe Queenan has forged a literary career out of caustic eviscerations of everything from baby boomers (Balsamic Dreams) to those tea drinkers across the Atlantic pond (Queenan Country). He eats acid and vitriol for breakfast. This, after all, is the man who once called Meryl Streep a "monotonously talented humanoid." So it might come as a surprise that he has peeled away some of his tough hide to try his hand at a tender memoir about growing up in Philadelphia. Closing Time is, by turns, brutally honest, brutally funny, and, yes, filled with scathing attacks on the unworthy. This time, Queenan targets his father, an alcoholic ne'er-do-well whose inability to hold a steady job kept the family hovering near the poverty line for years. Queenan Senior -- "a miserable, deranged, booze-soaked failure" -- was also fond of whipping his four children with the buckle end of a belt. "He beat us often and he beat us savagely," Queenan writes. Not quite an American Angela's Ashes, Queenan's memoir nonetheless takes the reader on a sentimental journey through Philly housing projects, his Catholic school years, an eventual escape into the comfort of literature, and a late-in-life reckoning with his dying father. One flaw with Closing Time -- and it's a relatively minor one -- is that because sarcasm is inevitably laced with exaggeration, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between truth and hyperbole. Some of Queenan's funniest lines are balanced against the harsh realities of his circumstances: "Back in the Paleocene 1950s, when being fond of one's children had not yet come into vogue, poor people didn't seem to mind all that much if one of their offspring went flying out into traffic, as everyone had spares." When he's not tossing off punchlines, Queenan takes a sober look at what it means to grow up as a have-not: "Poverty is a tumor it takes a lifetime to excise, because poverty is lodged deep inside the brain in a dark corner where the once-poor don't want to look." Closing Time probes that shadowy nook of Queenan's past, and the result is a book that's as sad as it is funny. --David Abrams
Editorials
Jonathan Yardley
[Queenan's] childhood and adolescence were tough, at times brutally so, yet there isn't a whisper of whine here, only a determination to face the truth as squarely as he can and to describe it without self-pity or sentimentality…It is a fine piece of work in every respect: self-exploratory but never self-absorbed, painful and funny, affectingly open in the gratitude it expresses to father figures without whom "I would have been sucked into the void." By contrast with the post-adolescent drivel that is the daily bread of the Age of Memoir, Closing Time is by a grownup, for grownups.—The Washington Post
Michiko Kakutani
As the book progresses…Mr. Queenan gradually finds a more nuanced voice, capable of expressing not just fury and condescension but also humor, irony and melancholy. His tortured relationship with his father slowly gains in depth and chiaroscuro, and his portraits of friends, relatives and teachers evolve into Dickensian character studies even as they immerse us in the gritty Philadelphia neighborhoods he knew as a boy.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Humorist and pop culture writer Queenan (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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
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