“Closing Time” allows both reader and author to see how the violent joylessness of the father, together with that of some of the priests, has fueled Queenan’s penchant for contempt. Of a pharmacist who employs him as a teen­ager, who introduces him to New York City and whom he genuinely admires, he feels compelled to write: “His gait suggested that of an oversized gnome, advancing with weird little prancing steps, like a timid dancing bear. . . . The composite image — beer gut, surgical jacket, chrome dome, Kool filters, Tilley hat — was not an attractive package.”  There’s no denying that Queenan’s prose can be scabrously entertaining, though he is usually funnier at the length of the essay, where the mockery has less time to congeal into bile or mere shtick. Yet “Closing Time” doesn’t need to be especially funny to work. The author is struggling to defuse an unexploded bomb in his psyche. We don’t need to laugh while we watch.  Along the way, Queenan marries an Englishwoman and starts a family. He quits drinking and apparently forgoes even spanking their children. By his early 40s, he has a lucrative career writing columns and books. His dream, “to make a living by ridiculing people,” has come true.  During a rare family visit, his aging father takes him aside to apologize: “One of the things I’ve learned through Alcoholics Anonymous is that you have to admit that you’ve hurt people and let them know how sorry you are.” Queenan is having none of it, though. “I did not have it in me to forgive him,” he writes, “but I shook his hand anyway, if only because this creepy vignette made me uncomfortable and I wanted it to be over.” To him, this is blackmail: “Accepting the proffered apology was de rigueur, for without it, the penitent substance abuser might relapse, if only out of disappointment at being denied absolution.”  The entire country has gone soft, he believes, granting blanket absolution to alcoholics merely “because they professed to be powerless before their addiction.” In a column for Newsweek, he excoriates A.A. and his father. Booze is much less addictive than cocaine or nicotine, he argues, yet people are expected to rid themselves of those habits or face the consequences. “Everyone who put a glass of liquor to his lips knew exactly what he was doing; it was not like coming down with malaria because you’d strayed into the wrong jungle.” He goes so far as to make a film, “Twelve Steps to Death,” scoffing at A.A.’s core approach.  Not long afterward, his father’s health starts to fail. Mrs. Queenan has kicked him out, and he’s landed in a flophouse. When word reaches Joe, he takes out his checkbook and moves his father into a decent apartment. Otherwise, though, he treats him with “the offhanded malice that had by this point become my livelihood.” When a trait he so loathes in his father has become his own stock in trade, how can he not pony up?  There will be truces near the end, but when the family attends the old man at his deathbed, there is precious little warmth or nostalgia. Two of his daughters consider their father “beyond redemption,” and their mother refuses, for herself and those daughters, to be listed in the obituary. The son feels neither love nor respect; he is there only because “having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son.” Three years later, the anniversary of Joe Sr.’s death passes unnoticed. “My father was dead,” Queenan writes, “and I did not miss him.”  Who, having been beaten by this man scores of times, would feel differently?  Irish Catholic poverty caused by paternal drunkenness was tackled 13 years ago by Frank McCourt in “Angela’s Ashes,” which Queenan, almost alone among the book-buying public, found “unreadable,” perhaps because of its climate of forgiveness. No children are whipped in that memoir, yet three of them die as a result of Malachy McCourt’s persistent intoxication. Whether Joe Queenan’s take on the subject is bracingly unsentimental or more than a little mean-spirited may depend on each reader’s own father.  James McManus is the author of “Positively Fifth Street.” His new book, “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker,” will be published in October.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Watch Out for Dad. Today's Paper|Subscribe
In Joe Queenan’s account of his life, the belligerent priests, the poverty, the girls and the music all pale beside the rages of his drunken, violently abusive father.