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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Closing Time: A Memoir
By Joe Queenan
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After 292 pages of virtually unrelenting Celtic melancholia, it's a welcome change of scenery—and pace—when Queenan trades the City of Brotherly Love for the City of Light. The author crosses the Atlantic and enters "another dimension": "Lots of friends, loads of alcohol, tons of merriment. Hundreds of books, hundreds of movies, scores of plays, even a few tentative stabs at writing fiction." Freed from the maudlin manacles of home, he blossoms intellectually, emotionally, and in other ways too, with a "chic French-Canadian nurse" initiating him into "the most vital rite of passage of all: sex with someone who knew what she was doing."
As its coup de grâce, his Parisian idyll seems to inoculate Queenan against future funk: "The year I spent on the Rue Mayet," he concludes, "was the year I nixed the official family credo and decided that life… was a gift, not a chore."
Ah, but la belle France has not finished bestowing her gifts upon Monsieur quite yet. Two years later, Queenan returns there to track down Francesca, an Englishwoman he had fallen in love with during his annus mirabilis. They move to New York and get married, exposing the author to an unaccustomed thrill: living life with "someone who gave not the slightest indication of latent insanity."
Convinced that his future lies in writing fiction, Joe pens four novels and more than 100 short stories. No buyer emerges for the novels. The stories, by contrast, find homes—but only in skin magazines or, worse, in literary rags that pay in the irredeemable currency of "contributor’s copies." Queenan's account of his years wandering in the freelance wilderness, "once receiving nine rejections in a single day," reminded me of the form rejection letter a colleague once received from Washingtonian magazine: "Your submission subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge."
Success continues to elude Queenan—and not undeservedly, he tells us, because "I did not have anything to say until I was thirty-five and even then, not much." Only when he renounces fiction, switches to journalism, and—not coincidentally—halts his own drinking does his peel-the-paint writing style catch on with the general public. (By now it's the late 1970s, and Joe has just learned that Francesca is pregnant with their son.) Benefiting from a change in the publishing zeitgeist—the 50-year-old editors who have been rejecting his work for not resembling the wry musings of James Thurber and Peter De Vries give way to 35-year-old editors in no mood for wryness—Queenan is finally invited into the house of mirth, placing articles in The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other pillars of print.
Memorably—shatteringly—Queenan writes a stinging rebuke of his father's voguish attempts to excuse but not to vanquish his alcoholism. Titled "Too Late to Say 'I'm Sorry,' " the piece appears in an extremely public forum, the popular "My Turn" column of Newsweek magazine, as a 900-word assault on alcoholics in general and Joe's father in particular. Queenan uses the essay to convey his deeply held (and deplorably backward, if you ask me) convictions that "reinventing alcoholism as a medical condition was despicable" and that "the vast majority of alcoholics… used liquor as a socially sanctioned medication enabling them to pretend that they were not the people they so obviously were."
Far from a vengeful act, Queenan asserts, he wrote the Newsweek piece because "it was the only story that ever really mattered to me." Not that he expected paternal retribution from the deed: By the time the essay appeared, no one in the family had the slightest idea where their father was living.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Oddly absent from these proceedings, you might surmise, is Queenan's mother. Au contraire—she is there in the wings all along, her presence understandably eclipsed by the chaos her husband caused. Not only for the narrator but for his siblings and father as well, Mrs. Queenan's role in these pages is about as far from validating as one character can get. "My mother was not a Madonna," Joe reflects. "She was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed." A product of the pre-Julia Child era, she was also "arguably the worst cook in the history of Western cuisine."
The night his parents got married, Joe's mother informs her husband that she does not love him—rather, not wanting "to end up an old maid," she had "grabbed the first guy off the boat." She also frequently reminds her children that she was never too gung-ho about their arrival on the scene, either. "Procreation, parenting, anything involving nurturing was a burr under her saddle," Queenan recalls. "Even when we were adults, she did not hesitate to remind us that being a mother was a job she never felt cut out for."
Years after the main events depicted in the memoir transpire, for example, Queenan is at his home in upstate New York, roughhousing on the floor with his infant son and daughter. His mother, looking on, strikes him as "a spectator watching a sport whose rules she neither understood nor had any great interest in learning."
No one raised by Depression-survivor Greatest Generation parents will fail to recognize this absentee approach to parenting. A master of spin long before it was known as such, Mrs. Queenan even succeeded in persuading her children that the family's downward slide was not a reversal of fortune but a mere inconvenience. "One of my mother’s most impressive traits," Joe grudgingly marvels, "was her ability to give reality an on-the-spot overhaul, dissembling here, fantasizing there, in the process making our misfortune seem not only tolerable but almost appetizing."
Born of a lifetime of dire necessity, this ability to soft-pedal the truth reaches its apotheosis in December 1997, when Queenan informs his mother that her estranged husband has died from cancer of the spine, throat, lungs, and other assorted organs. Her fatalistic response is etched in his heart: "It's always something."
Allan Fallow is the book editor of AARP The Magazine.
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