Jonathan Yardley
[Queenan's] childhood and adolescence were tough, at times brutally so, yet there isn't a whisper of whine here, only a determination to face the truth as squarely as he can and to describe it without self-pity or sentimentality…It is a fine piece of work in every respect: self-exploratory but never self-absorbed, painful and funny, affectingly open in the gratitude it expresses to father figures without whom "I would have been sucked into the void." By contrast with the post-adolescent drivel that is the daily bread of the Age of Memoir, Closing Time is by a grownup, for grownups.
—The Washington Post
Michiko Kakutani
As the book progresses…Mr. Queenan gradually finds a more nuanced voice, capable of expressing not just fury and condescension but also humor, irony and melancholy. His tortured relationship with his father slowly gains in depth and chiaroscuro, and his portraits of friends, relatives and teachers evolve into Dickensian character studies even as they immerse us in the gritty Philadelphia neighborhoods he knew as a boy.
—The New York Times
Kirkus Reviews
The waggish blue-collar Philly scribe (Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, 2004, etc.) ornaments his tough-childhood memoir with the sort of fancy writing natural to authors of Hibernian extraction. The Queenan family, never in the chips, had a hardscrabble life in the scruffy Irish-American precincts of the City of Brotherly Love. Love was scant. Mom was a terrible cook, and Father was a terrible drunk. The youngster's life was one of ongoing deprivation and off-brand merchandise in various tatterdemalion parishes. Queenan and his sisters couldn't wait to vacate their hostile family encampments on the wrong side of the Schuylkill River. At 13, the besieged lad believed he had an ecclesiastical vocation, but after one year at Maryknoll Junior Seminary he abandoned the cloth. So it was on to Catholic high school, then a Catholic college. He found surrogate fathers, first in a colorful dry-goods merchant who ran a kind of urban emporium, replete with picaresque clientele, next in an oddball apothecary. Further forming his persona were various part-time jobs, including the midnight shift at a bubblegum mill. Scrambling out of the proletariat, Queenan discovered art, music and Paris. He became a man of letters, but even after he achieved his dream ("to make a living by ridiculing people") he was still haunted by a lifelong enemy-his father. Queenan pere, his son recounts, was brutal and mean, no credit to any 12-step program. The text, mostly credible, is naturally infused with the Celtic gift of gab, garnished with grand displays of highfalutin lexicon. Loquacious and rococo, it is populated by congresses of poltroons and excoriates many mangynincompoops. Evidently Queenan resorts to his venerable thesaurus in an attempt to channel that heathen Mencken's lexical cantrips. Fortunately, the adverbial and adjectival antics work, and the flashes of characteristic caustic wit are accompanied by some truly sweet spots. Close to home and heart, this portrait of the artist shows Queenan at the top of his form-his best yet.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
An ambitious memoir.... Optimally engrossing, thanks to Queenan's gift for storytelling and acidic humor.
From the Publisher
"An ambitious memoir.... Optimally engrossing, thanks to Queenan's gift for storytelling and acidic humor." ---The Philadelphia Inquirer
