And just in case you get the impression that his life was miserable, let me assure you that he has many positive things to say. Joe Queenan experienced his childhood in the 1950s in Philadelphia. I have approved many $50 per month additions to the ADC check to pay for false teeth since good teeth were one of the things that the politicians and bureaucrats could agree were essential to escape from poverty. I have worked in low income housing projects where people actually had food stolen from their refrigerators. I have been a welfare worker during both the impressionable and older wise periods of my life. My experience of poverty is only academic and secondhand. And maybe in spite of the author’s attempts at humor, I just wasn’t going to find poverty and alcoholism that funny.

When your father is an unemployed alcoholic and your mother has four children she can’t feed and may not even love, and there is no car and no TV and no telephone and no prospects, finding out that a stranger has donated a can of artichoke hearts to the cause is not likely to fill a child’s heart with joy.Īs I began reading I thought that maybe I knew too much about poverty and alcoholism to really learn anything from Closing Time. This could be the topic sentence for the first quarter of this book: I'm serious about the 'good dad' thing - this book makes you feel good just by being a good husband and father and not worrying that you aren't the Hollywood director you thought you'd be in high school. Queenan's dad was a nightmare and I give him accolades for making it out of that home without turning into a hardened criminal. If you were looking for a book to make you feel like you're a good father, you found it.

There's a good story here, but there's so many detours you may give up on it before you get to your destination. Yes, I know his father is an alcoholic who beats him and that his mother is hiding down the way reading newspapers, but to hear it again and again still by page 115 doesn't make any sense. I'm halfway through it and it's just too damn long. This book was in dire need of a good editor. He takes pains to put in what he thinks are hilarious descriptions which tend to be overwritten, overwrought, and aimed primarily at making English professors titter. Joe Queenan isn't really all that funny in this book. If you haven't read this book, you may consider these points: This may be the first book I've put down in a good long time.

Closing Time by Joe Queenan