Closing Time: A Memoir

by Joe Queenan

Book Overview

A deeply funny and affecting memoir about a great escape from a childhood of poverty, "Closing Time" recounts Queenan's Irish Catholic upbringing in a family dominated by his erratic father. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067002063X
• ISBN13: 9780670020638
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

sounds like philly in the 50's-60's to me

it's taken me a while to get used to the vivid color of queenan's prose, and i haven't read him before this, but i have to say i don't understand the reviews on this site that pan the book. having lived in philly during the same years as joe, i can only say that i find everything he writes to be spot-on, accurate, and very well expressed. In addition, what could be a very dark, heavy recitation is couched in humorous terms that gave me plenty of belly-laughs, even while I cried at my own recollections of growing up in 'germantown' not far from east falls. also, i must say i have come to many of the same conclusions as Queenan about poverty, for example. it seems to me that anyone who grew up in philly during those years would have to have strong feelings and ideas and insights about poverty. i am routinely amazed by the obliviousness of many people - and those not always wealthy, exactly - who really don't have a clue about the inner workings of poverty and who have completely unrealistic expectations of the poor, even though they may wish them every good. i really believe that those who find this book negative or self-pitying must not know what they are talking about, but don't know that they don't know. well, i know, because i lived there, and i recognize the place of my birth. in fact, i'm mostly reading this book because it brings back memories of philadelphia, and reminds me both of what I do not miss, but grew up submerged in, and also what I do miss - which is Joe Queenan's point of view. philly-delphians (to distinguish them from the high-falutin' 'philadelphians' of the american imagination) are neither republican nor liberal, but imho, occupy a political category all their own that is distinctly proletariat, if that's not too negative a word to use. i would say they are the salt of the earth in the christian sense of that phrase. (and they are often catholic.) they will tell you the truth, un-sugar-coated, unvarnished, but with a generous helping of humor although that humor may be at your expense. it isn't personal, because the next moment it may be at my expense. these folks are terribly realistic because they have to be. it's rare that a people having the kind of necessity in their lives that breeds that kind of experience are able to find their way into any kind of respectable print, because there is so much bias against them from the more privileged classes. personally i do feel the whole nation could benefit from some of the lessons learned early by philly-delphians like queenan, who survived the blight of their youths and managed to make sense, beauty and economy of their experience. someone in another post wrote that he or she didn't understand queenan's use of literary citation, was he trying to prove he is more learned than others, has a better vocabulary, whatever. it's true that when you grow up thoroughly disenfranchised, you do have to prove yourself far more rigorously than those born with the proverbial

Touched a personal note with me

This is my first Joe Queenan book. I'd like to read more. Closing Time is not refreshing, nor is it delightful. Anyone who has had to deal with an alcoholic in the family can relate to the author's love-hate relationship with his father. Other reviews have chastized Queenan for being self-serving and of not seeing any good in his father. Quite the contrary, I think Queenen does a good job of trying to find some good to wrap around his father's memory. It is obvious that Queenan owes his love of language and reading to his father, and gives him credit for such. And in a perverse way, Queenan's retreating into books as an escape became, in part, his salvation. The book holds a particular interest for me. I grew up in that neighborhood about 10 years before Joe. I left just as the neighborhood began to change, in the early 60's, but this book rang true to the personalities, the sounds, the catch-phrases, and the mind set of the place. As a Protestant, I remember being very jealous of the Catholic girls at St.Benedict's because they got to wear white dresses and veils for the May procession. I can also remember my mother chastising me for walking home from school with a "colored boy", and telling me to be carefule of Eye-talians". As appalling as that sounds now, it was what it was. Some reviewers seem to take offense that Queenan is so hard on his father, only assigning blame. I wonder what book they were reading. I think the author gives quite a number of people in his life credit for having set him on a track other than the one he might have traveled. That includes his father. Is he bitter, and can he be scathing with respect to some of his father's peccadillos? You betcha, but having lived with an alcoholic parent, I can relate. My impression is that the very exercise of writing this book was a catharsis. Reading it has been the same. This has not been an easy book for me to read; I usually whip through a book in a day, but I'm trying to make this one last. The author's command of language is astounding, and at times a little too over-the-top. Were he in a conversation with me, I would be tempted to tell him: "get over yourself, already". On the other had, those words allow him to say exactly THE right thing -- paint the perfect picture. Use a dictionary if you need to. Glory in those words! Your English teacher would be proud of you.

An accurate account

I loved Joe Queenan's memoir, "Closing Time." This is an accurate account of the experiences of many people in lower and working class Philadelphia during the 1950's and 60's. As a Philadelphian who lived much like Queenan during that time, I can attest to his accuracy of living in the margins and feeling not quite good enough. I also loved reading about my old stomping grounds -- the streets, stores, schools etc. I'm glad that Queenan pulled himself up and overcame the obstacles that seem to hold so many people down. Despite a dysfunctional family, he excelled in school and aimed for higher aspirations than just working a regular 9-5 job. Thanks Joe for a great story. It's my story too!

Brilliant, funny and moving

This delightful book is a refreshing antidote to the hundreds -- no, thousands -- of self-indulgent whinefests about the authors' miserable childhoods and unworthy parents and all those preening self-help books cluttering up American bookstores. Joe Queenan had it as tough as anybody ever had it with his parents, especially his father. His memory is brutally clear, his prose sparkling and his history refreshingly sane. He does not minimize what happened to him, but he has transcended his past and is a better person and better writer for it. How refreshing to read a sentence like "Having a bad father is no excuse for being a bad son"!! A simple sentence, but read this book and you will understand how many decades of thoughtful struggle, perseverance and guts it took Joe Queenan to be able to write it. He had to dig deep within himself to get to the point where he could write this book and did so in a determined, tough and ultimately very successful way. He understands himself and his life without falling into maudlin self-pity or other vices Americans are today so eager to overshare with the public. He is hard on AA and never had to be psychoanalyzed. This book is full of grit, determination, and that rarest of commodities, wisdom. It has laugh out loud moments and others that make you stop and think about your own life. An extraordinary, moving, interesting and all-around wonderful book.

"'Tis" not.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with the work of Joe Queenan. No, that wording's too strong: it's more admiration-distaste. His sentences are like pomegranate seeds--acerbic, colorful, jewel-like--but I have to spit out the kernels. I loathe Queenan's politics, and maybe a little more than that. Don't get me wrong: I think he's worth ten Christopher Buckleys, a thousand David Brooks's, and even three-quarters of P. J. O'Rourke. Yet his lapidary prose and scintillating erudition are often marred by a layer of nastiness, the kind of sharply worded but bluntly presumptuous misanthropy that shows up in Igor Stravinsky's dismissal of Pablo Casals or W. C. Fields's of children and animals. I wholly enjoyed Queenan's book about sports fans (especially since purely with his writing, he intrigued me by a topic I had zero previous interest in,) but my subsequent excursions into his essays, his NY Times book reviews and such slender yet bitter tomes as "Balsamic Dreams" revealed an icky, class-baiting plebeian-Republican streak that felt like a book-learning-fied version of Sean Hannity. Seduced by his talent, I fantasized that Queenan was a basically decent, slightly gullible genius corrupted by the right-wing tabloid that published his first column ("Movieline," a stalwart spear-chucker in the culture war against the Hollywood "liberal elite.") I turned to his memoir "Closing Time" with a dual purpose: first and foremost, yes, for more of that prose, but also for a glimpse of that presumed younger idealist, his heart yet unpolluted by miasma from the GOP. But it turns out I was wrong. Queenan's misanthropy is not an accidental perversion of his true self or a calculated career move, but an intrinsic aspect of his character, shaped by childhood experiences with an emotionally distant, clinically certifiable mom, an abusive, ne'er-do-well dad, awful medical care, lousy nutrition, and wrong-headed urban planning. Queenan grew up poor. Not the romanticized salt-of-the-earth poor of Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes," but the debased white American urban dirt-poor of. . .well, can't quite think of a literary example. This book will do. This book will do. It's exquisitely written, compulsively readable, detailed and honest about everything from family psychology to economics and architecture (while avoiding any sappiness or special pleading.) And while it's about the fifties and sixties, it is especially true and necessary now. I quote from pp. 40-42: "Poverty goes far beyond not having money or food. Poverty means that when you do have money and food, the money gets spent unwisely and the food is not nutritious. . .Poverty is a lifestyle, a philosophy, a modus vivendi, an agglomeration of bad habits. . .It's about wearing shirts whose labels deliberately obscure the miniaturized words MADE IN PAKISTAN because everyone else is wearing shirts whose labels proudly proclaim MADE IN THE USA. . .Not until years and years later would it ever occur to any of