Queenan spent much of his youth trying to find a way to escape from his father and his father’s world. Queenan continues, was also fond of telling him and his sisters that they would never amount to “a pimple on an elephant’s rear end,” as if “the repetition of this prophesy would ensure that it came true, or aggrandize the size of the pimple he himself had amounted to.” He subjected the children to endless screeds about “subversive Negroes or the war in Vietnam, conversations that always ended in arguments, as my father viewed all of us as being in league with Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan.” Queenan recalls that “things around the house would start to disappear: the TV would get hocked to a pawnshop, then the radio, then the clock radio.” His father unloaded these things “not to buy food but to buy liquor,” the author writes, and when he was drinking, he frequently turned on his children, savagely beating them with his belt while their mother retreated to her bedroom, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. Having been laid off from a reasonably well-paying office position, his father went on to work as a security guard, furniture mover and truck driver, but none of these jobs lasted for long, and Mr. If you are poor and stupid and ugly, you are going to need to be even luckier.” The reader is subjected to seemingly unedited, rage-filled rants about his hatred of his father and the awfulness of growing up with no money, and sarcastic generalizations about the poor: “If you are born poor and stupid, you’re going to need to be very lucky.

In portions of this book that anger and the author’s love of hyperbole can make for trying, high-decibel screeds. Queenan has described himself as “an acerbic, mean-spirited observer of the human condition,” “a sneering churl” and a “human adder,” and his new book “Closing Time” traces the roots of his anger back to his childhood and his ugly, violent relationship with his alcoholic father. O’Rourke with the artful vituperation of Auberon Waugh, Mr. Gleefully combining the politically incorrect malice of P.

Queenan did indeed go on to make a living as a satirist and curmudgeon, hurling snarky, dyspeptic insults, like unhittable pitches, at baseball fans, baby boomers, British citizens and just about anyone or anything that failed to live up to his impossibly high standards. In this lumpy, unsentimental and ultimately very sad memoir, Joe Queenan writes that as a teenager he dreamed of making “a living by ridiculing people,” and it didn’t seem to matter all that much where he went to college, since “one couldn’t actually major in satire or invective.”Īs his earlier books and many articles for magazines and newspapers have demonstrated, Mr.

Closing time by joe queenan