CLOSING TIME, by Joe Queenan. Viking; 338 pages; $26.95.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Joe Queenan's memoir of his youth is basically an extended prosecutorial brief against his dead father, who beat the hell out his children when he was drunk and never forgot to degrade them emotionally on the rare occasions when he was sober.
The book certainly reveals the roots of Queenan's enjoyable surliness, for his environment was the mean streets of Philadelphia and a series of housing projects, rented houses and apartments. There really was no place for the children to turn because their mother was strangely passive, never wanted her children and didn't have much gift for or interest in raising them.
Good luck, because luck and brains are the only things that will save you from such a genetic and environmental stew. Queenan's blunt eloquence pays tribute to that knowledge.
He writes, "Poor people behave stupidly because poverty is a finishing school where children learn how to be stupid. Growing up poor teaches young people to buy clothing that shrinks, appliances that break, furniture that disintegrates, food that provides no nutrition — and, if possible, to overpay for it."
It didn't take much to set the old man off. Social injustice, Republicans, rock 'n' roll, black people, the collapse of Holy Mother Church, the fall of the big bands.
"Like most alcoholics — indeed, like most ex-alcoholics — my father could never abide not being the center of attention." When he got really hammered, he'd call the family together and make them say a maudlin rosary (there is nothing on earth quite as nauseating as the combination of ardent religion and equally ardent alcoholism).
I know about some of the same things that Queenan knows, and he captures the way alcoholics hold their families hostage, and project their own failings on everybody else. And there's something else he understands: Drunks at home are losers in the world.
"At some point in his life, he had decided that if he could not cast a shadow over the world, he would cast one over his family."
What the book lacks is, for lack of a better term, arc. Queenan hated his father at the age of 9, and hates him at the age of 59. Fair enough, but there's not a lot of emotional movement, and the book suffers for it.
Queenan pauses for extended portraits of some of the people that made a positive difference in his life — a girl who introduced him to classical music and a couple of older guys who hired him, liked him and let him realize that not all father-son relationships are scenarios of aberrant power. The character portraits are warm and, often, extremely funny.
Queenan's hole card always has been his honesty, and the fact that he's almost as hard on himself as he is on everybody else. Almost. But those two guys who hired him and amused him and were father figures for years? When their time was done, and Queenan had moved on in his life, he never made much attempt to keep up with them. No letters, no phone calls, no time taken to thank them for making a difference in his life.
Queenan's old man might have been the family drunk, but I don't think he was the only narcissist on the premises.
There are massive amounts of ethnic profiling in "Closing Time," which Queenan gets away with because most of it is directed at the shanty-Irish, to which he assuredly belongs and that he unreservedly loathes. Once he really gets rolling, some of the profiling slops over the sides. ("Did you know that Germans are cheap?")
Actually, the only Irish trait I've noticed is rampaging self-pity — also a default position for alcoholics. The Irish always are being done to, never doing, and "Closing Time" represents this singular mindset.
All this said, I like the book's bluntness, its invigorating anger, and I like the lack of bland, mush-mouthed forgiveness. Some things are beyond redemption, and the sad truth is that some people never do anything more productive in life than leave it — the sooner the better. The problem is that it takes most of them far too long to accomplish their mission.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.