Joe Queenan is an essayist whose jaundiced eye, sharp tongue, and sharper humor have dissected the great American insect, to great effect, in these pages. But in Closing Time: A Memoir (Viking, 352 pp., $26.95) the microscope is turned inward in a genuinely remarkable–certainly startling and eloquent–autobiography of childhood and youth in the Philadelphia of the 1960s and ’70s.
To be sure, it is only incidentally set in Philadelphia, for Queenan’s landscape is not so much the exterior world but the inner landscape of a sad, horrific, even terrifying, working-class Irish-American family that conforms to rude stereotype–drunken, pugnacious, violent father; melancholic, detached, ineffectual mother–but never fails to fascinate, even hypnotize, the reader. It is impossible to exaggerate the travails of the Queenan household–an uncertain, hand-to-mouth existence, featuring hunger and routine privation, as well as beatings and psychological torment–or the horrors of everyday life for an intelligent, perceptive son of the household.
The author’s detachment in Closing Time is not just powerful, but impressive by any standard: Queenan recounts these Dickensian set-pieces with an eye for the telling detail, and yet with the characteristic humor, even the comic sensibility, that is his trademark. This is a Baby Boom memoir that could not be further removed from the world of Davy Crockett, Woodstock, or summers on Cape Cod.
Winston Groom is best known as a novelist (Forrest Gump), but in Vicksburg, 1863 (Knopf, 496 pp., $30) he assumes the mantle of another southern craftsman with uncommon narrative powers, the late Shelby Foote, whose three-volume history of the Civil War might be seen as the model for this masterful account of the siege of Vicksburg.
Groom makes the point that the Union campaign to command the Mississippi River Valley was arguably of greater importance in the longer term than the Battle of Gettysburg, raging as Vicksburg fell. Gettysburg halted General Robert E. Lee’s advance in taking the war to the north–and of course, inspired Abraham Lincoln’s memorial address, which put the war’s rationale into 10 unforgettable sentences–but the fall of Vicksburg closed off an important supply route and effectively divided the Confederacy in half. The verdict on Gettysburg is mixed, neither a wholesale Union victory nor a Confederate defeat. But the results of Vicksburg were unambiguous: It sealed the fate of the Confederacy, and drew the Civil War to a slow, but foregone, conclusion.
Above all, it signaled the rise of General Ulysses S. Grant, the fighting commander of Lincoln’s dreams, whose strategic vision and grim determination dug the roadbed to the end of the war. Groom’s command of the military facts, and his extraordinary mixture of vignettes big and small, brings this distant, chaotic, and shockingly violent episode to life, and leaves the reader to ask, what’s next?
To the extent that modern conservatism may be defined as a temperament, as well as a body of ideas, we owe something to P. J. O’Rourke, whose lifetime hit parade (Republican Party Reptile, Give War a Chance, Parliament of Whores, etc.) is soon to be joined by a personal anthology on the automobile–Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hellbending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be–With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn (Atlantic Monthly, 288 pp., $24)–the subtitle of which is refreshingly comprehensive and self-explanatory.
The tone and tenor of this volume may not appeal to Obama-era consumers in the market for a hybrid; but then again, P. J. O’Rourke being his inimitable self, they are likely to find it irresistible. “I’ve reworked many of the pieces,” he says, “because the writing–how to put this gently to myself?–sucked. I may not have become a better writer over the years but I’ve become a less bumptious and annoying one, I think.” Less bumptious and annoying, to be sure; but like the auto mechanic of mythology, funny and wise at the same time.
Diane Scharper, who teaches writing at Towson University in Baltimore and reviews fiction for THE WAEEKLY STANDARD, has edited (with Philip Scharper Jr., M.D.) an intriguing collection of autobiographical pieces entitled Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability (Apprentice, 208 pp., $22.95). The memoirs take various forms–a few, indeed, are in verse–and the definition of “disability” includes disease and injury. But the message is the various ways in which humans adapt to physical misfortune or imperfection–or “handicaps,” as it used to be said–and yet find the means to put one foot in front of the other, and live. These memoirs are intended not to inspire, although inspiration is an obvious by-product, but to illustrate the uses of adversity, and the different ways different people tame the beasts of disability, pain, and impairment. Or, in certain memorable instances, turn catastrophe into an unanticipated chance.
Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
