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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Closing Time: A Memoir
By Joe Queenan
Review by Allan Fallow, April 2009
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Joe Queenan can make you crack a smile before you crack the cover of his latest book. Consider the titular—and titter-inducing—evidence from three of his nine previous tomes: Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America; If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble: Movies, Mayhem, and Malice; Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation.
This makes Queenan one of our last living LOLAs (Laugh-Out-Loud Authors). It also made me jump at the chance to read his memoir, Closing Time. In these pages, I blithely imagined, Queenan would reveal the secret ingredients of his trademark corrosive wit.
Corrosion? Levels topped off, sir! Wit? Not so much—unless you relish the black humor that powers many a squalid scene in Closing Time, Queenan's searing recollection of growing up poor, Irish-Catholic, and abused in some of the more tenebrous (his word) parishes of North Philadelphia. This is the definitive remembrance of the dark side of boomer childhood.
Forget about the mass of men leading "lives of quiet desperation." Closing Time chronicles the depredations of one man—the lifelong drunk who was Queenan's father—leading a life of raucous despair. Queenan père was unable to hold a steady job because, well, he preferred to drink. This tragic failing (not flaw, the son insists) earned him three years in a Georgia military jail for going AWOL at the close of World War II, and it would evince itself in Joe's lifetime as an aggressively checkered employment record. The elder Queenan's most stable job—driving a pretzel truck—lasted all of three years. In his career year of fecklessness, he burned through 13 separate employers.
Not that Joe's father lacked redeeming traits. "He had a highly developed sense of humor," his son recalls, "and knew how to spin a yarn…he was, by turns, mordant, puckish, irreverent." He could banter easily with strangers—"an art not all men possess"—and belonged to a now-extinct species, "the working-class autodidact who reads good books because he understands that good books lift mankind out of the slime." And despite having dropped out of high school, Queenan's father saw the "cathartic power" of writing. Indeed, the notion of becoming a writer entered Joe's head at age 10, when his father enlisted him to transcribe his "juiced-up" jeremiads to newspaper editors.
Pioneering the Queenan family tradition of making any bad situation worse, however, the father displayed a genius for settling his family of six in whatever sketchy North Philadelphia neighborhood was about to nosedive next. In 1958—"the watershed moment in our [family] history"—the senior Queenan lost the only marginally white-collar job he ever held, forcing the family's move to the Schuylkill Falls Housing Project. There Mr. and Mrs. Queenan, Joe, his older sister, Agnes Marie, and his two younger sisters, Eileen and Mary Ann, settled into one of 700 "two-story, flat-roofed, three-bedroom structures" that Queenan condemns as "house-type objects."
Closing Time is both a settling of scores and the author's effort, at age 58, to fit his father "into some kind of context where he is not merely a villain." Mission partly accomplished: This memoir captures and coolly dissects the man's inchoate rage at the world, painting a devastating portrait of The American Father as Latter-Day Demon that eclipses the lesser paternal tyrants of Pat Conroy's Great Santini and Moritz Thomsen's My Two Wars.
"At some point in his life," Queenan recalls, "[my father] had decided that 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."
By the time this B-list ogre expires, essentially penniless (and with barely a dozen people at his funeral service), the reader heartily seconds his son's verdict: The man was "a bad habit," "a nightmare from which his family needed to awake," and a "household Svengali" lording it over "a penal colony where everyone had his last name."
So how did Joe Queenan survive it all? How did he hold out long enough to become such a caustic and savagely uncompromising social critic—a national treasure unafraid to speak his mind on those frequent occasions when the captains of industry, the kings of commerce, or the moguls of media reveal themselves to be emperors with no clothes?
Queenan identifies three saving graces: the Catholic Church, the public library, and the generosity of relatives. Together these cultural forces sustained Clan Queenan during the four "wilderness years" the family spent in the projects. And as Closing Time makes painfully clear, a childhood rife with patricidal fantasies is not necessarily bad training for a career as an iconoclastic firebrand.
Apoth-calypse now
After receiving a "superb education" at Saint Bridget's Elementary School and volunteering to serve Mass for the nuns at plummy private Ravenhill Academy (Grace Kelly's alma mater), it's no surprise when the adolescent Queenan gets it into his head that he may have a calling as a priest. "Admittedly," he writes, "I was under unrelenting pressure from nuns and priests and relatives to don the Roman collar; they were forever pulling me aside and asking, 'Do you still think you have a vocation?' "
But that's not entirely why he entered the Maryknoll Junior Seminary (officially, the Venard Apostolic School) in Clark's Summit, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1964. No, the teenaged Queenan's true motivations were "a craving for prestige, an aversion to working at a nine-to-five job, and…an all-consuming desire to get out of my father's house forever."
The ploy succeeds—for nine months, at any rate, during which the author undergoes "all the normal rites of passage…I began to smoke the demon weed. I took up the guitar and, like many guitarists, quickly became as proficient on the instrument as I was ever likely to get." Other rites of passage recounted in these pages are infinitely more harrowing. Queenan slugs his father back at age 16—the first and last time such retaliation proves necessary, for the blow reconfigures their relationship—and attempts suicide at 20.
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