BOOK REVIEW: Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan Picador pp338, £12.99
THIS IS a book that has sharply divided critics in the US. Joe Queenan is an acerbic cultural commentator, a pundit whose ambition was “to ridicule people for a living”.
However, for his 10th book, he has turned his hand to a memoir of growing up in Philadelphia in a struggling Irish-American family with a cruel, alcoholic father who beat his kids and who was constantly losing jobs.
Queenan will be taking part in the Dublin Writers’ Festival at an event on Sunday, June 7th, and his book feels timely over here, given the revelations about the abuse and neglect of children.
In heart-rending detail, he shows the lasting damage done to kids, especially by an unloving father-son relationship.
Small acts of kindness are remembered forever: a glass of milk, a new toy, or, for Queenan, driving around in his father’s van as he delivered snacks and pretzels.
It makes for an unremitting read, and there is very little redemption, except in the author’s later life, when he overcomes his background and goes to college.
It is an honest book, but for someone who makes much of other people’s cruelty, Queenan is capable of considerable harshness himself. He describes a Fr Cartin who “had been waging a decades-long delaying action against some kind of pulmonary disease, spewing his malignant breath everywhere, [and] persistently threatening to kick the bucket without ever actually getting around to doing so”.
This heartless description goes on for a while, and it is hard to believe that Queenan was himself considering a religious vocation.
Much of the writing is like the mockery of a teenage stand-up.
His uncle Jerry, for example, was “tight with a buck”, and “uncontrovertible evidence of this” was the discovery that he had kept a cabinet full of his late wife’s pills and medicines, which perhaps “constituted some idiosyncratic pharmaceutical memorial to his fallen spouse, or perhaps he was just cheap”.
Or perhaps it was a memorial, and so this is not “uncontrovertible evidence” at all. But Queenan is reluctant to concede this, so as to keep with the convinced sweep of his narrative.
He writes with a fluency, but it is the fluency of invective and comes easy.
The book is good on his Irish-American background and urban America and its social and ethnic divisions, about which Queenan is distinctly un-PC.
He describes honestly his ambition to become a writer, ploughing through all the great novels and then churning out stories himself, before realising that it wasn’t going to work out.
And there are fine passages about his unyielding father.
“He saw the ship leaving the harbour, and if he couldn’t be on it, he’d just as soon it went down with all hands.
“It never crossed his mind that our good fortune could be his to share; he could not imagine his children returning later in life to act as his benefactor or seek his counsel the way children had been doing since time immemorial.
“He was convinced that he was beyond forgiveness, incapable of understanding that while forgiveness cannot always be earned, it can always be granted.”
This makes it a little strange then that Queenan should attack Alcoholics Anonymous and the way it gave his father a chance to come back, rather late in the day, and seek some forgiveness.
But then, by the end, the author does come to terms with his father, and his legacy, and he even saves him from the flophouses.
As is often the case, Queenan probably resembles his father far more than he would like to realise.
- Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan Picador pp338, £12.99
Eamon Delaney is a journalist