Pete Croatto, January 2013
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
P.O. Box 120 • New Hope, PA 18938 • Voice 800.354.8776 • Fax 215.862.9845 • www.icondv.com • www.facebook.com/icondv
Armed with acerbic wit and biting criticism, Joe Queenan
takes on America’s culture.
Culture Warrior
After years of writing shrewdly, eloquently, and viciously about popular culture in books such as Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon, Joe Queenan is making it personal. The renowned humorist’s stunning 2009 memoir, Closing Time, detailed his tumultuous Philadelphia childhood with an unreliable, alcoholic father and an emotionally numb mother.
Books served as a way to elevate Queenan from a dead-end life. Those wonderful, mystical objects take center stage in One for the Books ($24.95, Viking), available for sale now. A voracious reader—by his estimate, he’s read between 6,000 and 8,000 books—Queenan, 62, shares his astute observations on the reading life: how bookstores and libraries beat Kindles, the value of awful books, how a bad cover can deter us from reading a book.
The overall theme of One for the Books makes it indispensible: Books—actual books with spines and pages and dust jackets—represent a life and feed it. We form friendships based on them. We remember where we were when we bought them. “The presence of books in my hands, my home, my pockets, my life will never cease to be essential to my happiness,” he writes.
Queenan, who has authored ten previous books and has written for just about every major publication, was more than happy to talk about books. And writing. And Philadelphia, a city he loves even though it has low self-esteem. He spent nearly two hours enthusiastically answering my questions.
The interview, edited and condensed for clarity and space, begins after Queenan concludes a lengthy list of the books he’s reading or has read, including a recent, not-so-hot novel about the 1960s (Aria Beth Sloss’ Autobiography of Us] and a sub-par effort from Tom McCarthy.
If you didn’t have the curiosity to get different mind-sets, to be exposed to different things, wouldn’t that be worse than having a never-ending list of books to read?
Yes, and you’d just be like everybody else.
This is a kind of managed insanity. That’s what the book is about. Because if I was compulsive about everything in my life, I wouldn’t be able to function. But I’m really only compulsive about books. I’m not as compulsive about music as I am about books. …I could get up tomorrow and write exactly the same book about music, because I think I’ve been to about 2,000 concerts, so I could write the same book about music. But the difference is I’m not constantly thinking about music. I’m not constantly, like, reconfiguring my collection of CDs or I’m not thinking about whether I still like Frederick Delius. Whereas with books, I’m always thinking and I’ve always got these projects going and I think it’s probably because books saved my life.
Would the way you look at books be any different if you weren’t a writer?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. People who aren’t writers, they don’t see how writing works. They read the story. They don’t see how words are put together. They don’t hear rhythms. It’s like no matter how much you know about music if you talk to a professional musician, they just ignore you. …I think one of the things about art is that you do not have to appreciate what an artist or a writer or a musician does to enjoy it, you just enjoy it at a different level. When I go to the National Gallery of Art in London with my friend Mike, who is a painter, he points things out that I would never, ever, ever notice about painting… So I think that you look at things completely differently if you understand how they’re done, but that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them. You don’t have to know how a helicopter is assembled in order to enjoy being in a helicopter.
You’ve written here and in Closing Time about reading Fitzgerald while cleaning out the overhead funnel at a bubble gum factory and how the bookmobile provided an escape for you. Is that enjoyment or escapism diminished with your current approach to reading?
No, not at all. I think one of the great things about writing is you feel, even though there are so many writers who are so much better than you, you feel like you’re on the ship with them. Like you’re in steerage and they’re in first-class. But you’re on that ship.
One of the things I really like about the way my career played out is that I write op-ed pieces and I write movie reviews and I write book reviews. And part of the reason why I enjoy doing that is that what’s George Orwell and Graham Greene did. I always thought it was great that those guys didn’t go off to some writer’s colony in New Hampshire and disappear for ten years and not write a book. They were constantly engaged in their society. They were constantly reading something and going, “Well, fuck that, I’m going to write an op-ed piece about that.” I just always admired that so much about them. I admired those writers who participated in discourse with their society, rather than going off into some ivory tower.
I loved…when Romney said to Obama, “You can have your own airplane and you can have your own house but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” And I just thought, so now we’ve reached the point where Mitt Romney is quoting from something he read in Maureen Dowd’s column that she remembered Daniel Patrick Moynihan saying. And the way Romney said it was [like], Yeah right, Mitt, you thought that up. That wasn’t one of your 25-year-old speechwriters who thought that up. But it was also like, “What a clever boy am I. I said, ‘You’re not entitled to your own facts.’” So I thought about it and go, Why not? Why can’t we have our own facts? So I wrote this story for The Wall Street Journal: I’m just going to have my own facts from now on and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, tea is coffee, the square root of sixteen is my turtle, and Denmark is in Portugal. And if you don’t like those facts then get your own facts, because these are my facts. When that idea came to me, it was like, “My God, this is so great.” It’s not like you pat yourself on the back and go, Wow, that’s so fucking ingenious. I thought of this great idea. It’s like, Thank you, whoever it is out there, the god of ideas, for throwing that one my way.
And you don’t get that by going to a writer’s colony or locking yourself in a room for six months.
You don’t get it by reading The New Yorker, because that’s just an echo chamber. You get it by being responsive to the world that is around you. That’s the exhilarating thing about being a writer: Either you believe that the world is an exciting place or you don’t. And if you believe that the world is an exciting place then you’re just responsive to the things that go on around you, and then you can transmute them.
Speaking of responding to the world relating to books, has anyone given you a Kindle?
I think somewhere along the line somebody offered me one, but I just said no. I have no interest in that. I don’t care if people use them. It doesn’t bother me. A friend of mine in England, who is very, very smart and very well-educated, she has a Kindle because she loads it up with 12 crummy books and she goes to Italy. That makes perfect sense if you’re reading crummy books, but if you’re reading books that you love and that you want to go back and read over and over again, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t read 12 books on vacation. I might read two books on vacation. I don’t read a lot when I’m traveling. I don’t read on planes very much. I usually talk to the person sitting next to me.
Why is that? When someone talks to me on a plane, I’m usually looking for an excuse to get out of the conversation.
Because I think within about 45 minutes of talking to strangers, they will tell you the central drama of their life. I think that people go into some sort of confessional mode. I’m never going to see you again, and I’m going to talk to you. People just tell you the most amazing things about their marriages, about their careers, about their kids. I do find it interesting that almost immediately when you talk to people you can figure out what’s wrong with them. A psychologist will milk it for ten years and keep having them come back, but almost immediately you can find out exactly what’s wrong with them, exactly what they would need to do to fix their life. And I’m sure they would say the same thing about me. I’m interested in people, too.
And one of the reasons that I don’t read things like The New Yorker is because sometimes I go to parties up here and all they talk about is stuff they’ve read in The New Yorker or The New York Times. You know there’s a whole world out there that is not just that, and all you’re doing is exchanging opinions of people who are just like you. So, it’s like, let me guess: You hate Romney. Let me guess: You hate the Tea Party. Let me guess: You’re disappointed that Obama didn’t accomplish more in his first [term]. Let me guess: You wish we would get out of Afghanistan. Let me guess: You don’t understand why children don’t read more. Yeah. OK. We’re on board with that one. I like more to engage with people who I don’t know where they got their opinions from. One of the problems with the chattering class is that everything they say you go, “Yup, New York Times page A16, October 12. I read that story too.”
Going back to books: Behind me are three bookcases full of books. Like you, I have memories attached to my books, about where I was, who I was with. And you mention in One for the Books that a Kindle can’t do that. I think the Kindle is more for people who are interested in the technology. If you’re reader, you’re a reader. The technology isn’t going to help you get in that direction.
That’s exactly right. When I was a little kid I read The Iliad and things like that. I read Treasure Island and Kidnapped. I think the first time that I was aware of a book striving for some kind of artistic merit was when I read A Farewell to Arms, which interestingly enough is a book I no longer like. But when I read A Farewell to Arms I was very conscious of the fact that this isn’t like stuff that I’ve been reading. And I don’t know if everyone has that experience.
I think that’s one of the functions of books like Girl with the Pearl Earring. They’re books that occupy that middle ground between art and trash. Those books are really good. I make fun of them: the books that if women haven’t read by December 31, they have to throw away, like Life of Pi or Bel Canto or The Shipping News or any of those books. What I don’t like is when people talk about those books as if they were great.
…One of things I constantly have happen to me is I will read about ten books from the library or that I pick up somewhere, and they’re good books… They’re very readable books. They’re frequently written by people who went to writers’ schools. They’re professionally crafted books. They’re excellent books, but then after I read them it’s like, “I’ve got to read some Balzac. I’ve got to read somebody who can really throw that fucking knockout punch. I’ve got to read Jane Eyre. I’ve got to read Cervantes.”
You’re a voracious reader of fiction, but why the emphasis on writing non-fiction? And do you have an idea for a novel that you’d like to try at some point?
I wrote four novels and I wrote about 100 short stories, and I got about 60 of the stories published in literary magazines, not the big ones. I also had them published in some skin magazines and things like that. I had this epiphany. I was at this small book fair at New York University in 1981. There were all these people there that I sort of knew by correspondence. There was this one guy there who was going to publish my novel. He invited me to a party in Chelsea. So we went to these people’s loft, and all of the people were gathered around in this circle and they were mourning this woman whose husband put out a self-published magazine that had bankrupted them and then she had committed suicide, I think. They were all sort of telling anecdotes about her, holding hands. And I thought, Wow, this totally sucks. I went into the bathroom to get something to drink, because they said there was beer in the bathroom—and the entire tub was filled with Old Milwaukee. And I just said to my wife, “I want champagne. That’s my idea of being a writer. I’m going to be like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. This is not for me.”
It was very important for me to be successful as a writer. And it was very important for me to be successful as a satirist. But it didn’t particularly matter to me in what form that happened. So I literally, literally, stopped writing fiction for 30 years and then last year I wrote a novel that nobody liked, except my agent…And then I just started writing another one and I’m about halfway through that. Now I’m just writing them recreationally. I think I’m in the middle of two new novels, and they’re short, funny, but I’m just doing it purely recreationally. Because writing is so easy for me, so I can come in and write tons and tons of stuff every day if I have any trouble. I wrote four stories in the past two days.
The ideal thing is when your work is something that you actually love, and not something that you enjoy the results of. I like the physical act of writing. I like coming to my office and putting words on the page and then sending it to somebody. The rest of it—I like the money, obviously—I don’t particularly care about anything other about writing. As a rule, I don’t talk very much about my writing. I don’t go to parties or anything like that, and I don’t really use my writing to advance my social standing. I think I’m like a painter. They’re only happy when they’re painting. I think a lot of writers are very happy when they’re at parties and conferences and don’t really enjoy the writing that much. For a lot of writers, I think it’s drudgery. But for me, writing—the jokes are new to me when I write them.
An ICON contributor since 2006, Pete Croatto also writes movie reviews for The Weekender. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Broadway.com, Grantland, Philadelphia, Publishers Weekly, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @PeteCroatto.