Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

by Joe Queenan

Overview

One semitropical Fourth of July, Joe Queenan's English wife suggested that the family might like a chicken vindaloo in lieu of the customary barbecue. It was this pitiless act of gastronomic cultural oppression, coupled with dread of the fearsome Christmas pudding that awaited him for dessert, that inspired the author to make a solitary pilgrimage to Great Britain.

Freed from the obligation to visit his wife's relations, as he had done for the first twenty-six years of their marriage, Queenan decided that he would not come back from Albion until he had finally penetrated the limey heart of darkness.
The result is a very funny, picaresque adventure that will appeal to anglophile and anglophobe alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312425210
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/15/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Joe Queenan is the bestselling author of True Believers and Balsamic Dreams. He is a contributing writer at Men's Health, a columnist for Smart Money, and writes regularly for The New York Times. He lives in Tarrytown, New York.

Editorial Reviews

New York writer Joe Queenan ventures into Bill Bryson territory with this amused and amusing look at Blighty.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“The book is less a pilgrimage, more a voyage round Joe Queenan's head. . . . his extensive knowledge of popular music, his lovely reveries on books and reading, his occasionally nonchalant way with facts, and his sly humor.” —Allison Pearson, The New York Times

“Very much a travel book, but a particularly funny and interesting one.” —William Georgiades, New York Post

From the Publisher

Humorist Queenan calls this account of his 2002 trip to Great Britain "an affectionate jeremiad," conveying both his emotional ambivalence and displaying his favorite rhetorical device, the oxymoron. The West End musical We Will Rock You is "triumphantly cretinous"; a village woman is "belligerently harmless"; the museum curator wears an "ecstatically sober dress," etc. More broadly, contradiction is basic both to Queenan's humor and to his love-hate relationship with the British. He loves their "arch phrasing, infectious understatement and delightful euphemisms," just as he hates when all that posturing culminates in "the twit," that "master of rehearsed eccentricity." As with many travel accounts, one learns more about the traveler than about the locale. Queenan is a connoisseur of bad art; he can endure roomfuls of bad paintings at the Tate, just to make naughty remarks about the "insidious" hairstyles of yesteryear. Madame Tussaud's? It's "insufficiently absurd... nowhere near as bad as it ought to be." Conversely, he's thrilled to book a room at Durham's 500-year-old castle, complete with ghosts and a view of the cathedral. Indeed, the "American Dream," as Queenan explains it, is to stand on a fog-swept London street, watching the bobbies and dodging the double-deckers. As he says, there "isn't anything in the world better than riding a London double-decker bus." Hand-sell to the tweedies? Agent, Joseph Vallely. (Nov. 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Prolific social critic Queenan (True Believers, 2003, etc.) considers Queen (but not much) and country (more, from Glasgow to Penzance) and delivers the age-old I-kid-because-I-love-you hustle. Because the subject can't be encompassed in one volume, it's far from a comprehensive Baedeker. At times, Queenan offers a Perelman-on-the-road style, sometimes it's Mencken-at-home, on occasion it's snarky and usually persnickety in its take on Old Blighty. From the heydays of Boadicea and Richard the Lion Heart to Churchill and Thatcher the Iron Heart, things, in Queenan's view, haven't changed much. His British spouse always knew, we can be sure, that Noddy's car goes "parp!" and is never dismayed by clotted cream. Britons at home are still endearingly crazy, even fruitcake nuts. From York to Liverpool, from Hadrian's Wall to Tintern Abbey, he finds wonderful eccentricities and appalling pop-culture artifacts. In the latter category, the author places most of West End theater (case in point: The Mouse Trap) and the oeuvre of Sir Paul McCartney. Indeed, there's much blather about musical taste with undue regard to Liverpuddlian tribute bands. While Sting is okay, Christopher Hogwood needs some correction, and Lloyd Webber's crimes, we're reminded, are horrendous. As a child, the author was captivated by Beau Geste and the myth of the inflexible upper lip. High in the Highlands, cozy in the Cotswolds, and besotted with history-of which there is simply too much-Queenan rants about legend in Glastonbury, choochiness in London, and all things twee. In its juicier moments, this apple doesn't fall far from the twee, though the usually dyspeptic author notes that he's personally "more sarcastic thanarch." Waxing wroth, Queenan gets our British cousins to show us their knickers. They get up his nose, so he hits our funny bones in this antic panto. With a comic crumpet, Queenan leaves his love in Albion. It's a bit of alright, Percival.

Kirkus Reviews