Description
"Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the story of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house crammed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather. Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns first to his father, a DJ whom he can only access via the radio (Moehringer calls him The Voice and pictures him as "talking smoke"). When The Voice suddenly disappears from the airwaves, Moehringer turns to his hairless Uncle Charlie, and subsequently, Uncle Charlie's place of employment--a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage. While Moehringer may occasionally resort to an overwrought metaphor (the footsteps of his family sound like "storm troopers on stilts"), his writing moves at a quick clip and his tale of a dysfunctional but tightly knit community is warmly told. "While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us," Moehringer says, and his story makes us believe it. --Brangien Davis From Publishers Weekly [Signature] Reviewed by Terry GolwayYou needn't be a writer to appreciate the romance of the corner tavern—or, for that matter, of the local dive in a suburban strip mall. But perhaps it does take a writer to explain the appeal of these places that ought to offend us on any number of levels—they often smell bad, the decor generally is best viewed through bloodshot eyes and, by night's end, they usually do not offer an uplifting vision of the human condition.Ah, but what would we do without them, and what would we do without the companionship of fellow pilgrims whose journey through life requires the assistance of a drop or two?J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Los Angeles Times , has written a memoir that explains it all, and then some. The Tender Bar is the story of a young man who knows his father only as "The Voice," of a single mother struggling to make a better life for her son, and of a riotously dysfunctional family from Long Island. But more than anything else, Moehringer's book is a homage to the culture of the local pub. That's where young J.R. seeks out the companionship of male role models in place of his absent father, where he receives an education that has served him well in his career and where, inevitably, he looks for love, bemoans its absence and mourns its loss.Moehringer grew up in Manhasset, a place, he writes, that "believed in booze." At a young age, he became a regular—not a drinker, of course, for he was far too young. But while still tender of years, he was introduced to the culture, to the companionship and—yes—to the romance of it all. "Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel close to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship," he writes. For young J.R., that place was a gin mill on Plandome Road where his Uncle Charlie was a bartender and a patron. The Tender Bar 's emotional climax comes after its native son has found success as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times . On September 11, 2001, almost 50 souls who lived and loved in Moehringer's home town of Manhasset were killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One was a bartender we've met along the way. Another was one of the author's cousins.Moehringer drove from Denver, where he was based as a correspondent for the Times , to New York to mourn and comfort old friends. He describes his cousin's mother, Charlene Byrne, as she grieved: "Charlene was crying, the kind of crying I could tell would last for years."And so it has, in Manhasset and so many other Long Island commuter towns. Moehringer's lovely evocation of an ordinary place filled with ordinary people gives dignity and meaning to those lost lives, and to his own. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New Yorker In the mid-seventies, Moehringer, aged nine, first entered Dickens, a smoky Long Island pub. Through the next decades it became, variously, his hideout, "holy place," surrogate father, and "security blanket." But, perhaps as a result of his reverence for the place-and despite his assurances that he can accurately recall drunken conversations long past-scenes there often feel contrived and mawkish. The stronger episodes in this memoir, such as an endearing series of failures while working as a Times copyboy, take place away from Dickens's hazy influence. Revering a bar had other dangers, too; Moehringer eventually becomes unhappy with his drinking habits and decides that "growing up" means "sobering up." The bar had started to seem like a "submarine trapped on the ocean floor." Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker From Bookmarks Magazine Like the author himself, critics fell in love with the colorful cast of regulars who populate The Tender Bar . They were also moved by Moehringerx92s poignant if overly sentimentalized, sometimes manipulative, account of the place where he learned what it means to be a manx97or at least drink like one. Reviewers ached with the young Moehringer when he tuned his grandparentsx92 radio to listen to the disc-jockey father who had abandoned him, and they envied the easy camaraderie he found among the shopworn patrons of the neighborhood tavern. Some critics complained that Moehringer removed too many of the sharp edges of his drinking buddiesx92 troubled lives, but no one disputed his first-rate storytelling. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist *Starred Review* People don't buy memoirs to read about happy families. And yet, for those who read a lot of memoirs, it can still be startling to learn both how many people have unhappy families--and how quickly we become inured to those people's pain. It's a rare writer who recollects his trials with clarity and dispassion, giving us not voyeurism but a good look at ourselves. Moehringer, raised poor by his melancholy mother, found himself looking for male role models wherever he could find them--often among the regulars at Publicans, a Manhasset, Long Island, bar that sounds a bit like Cheers with swearing. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, he recalls events as disparate as losing his virginity and getting his first newspaper job (at the New York Times ) with a newsman's imperative to get the story. The reconstructed dialogue can be a bit cinematic, but that's a quibble. Funny, honest, and insightful, The Tender Bar finds universal themes in an unusual upbringing and declares a real love of barroom life without romanticizing it too much. Keir Graff Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "An engaging delight" -- San Francisco Chronicle "In his gimlet-eyed memoir, The Tender Bar , J.R. Moehringer lovingly and affectingly toasts a boyhood spent on a barstool." -- Vanity Fair "Simply a wonderful book about a heaven of a life that had everything going against it except intense love . . ." -- James Salter, author of Burning the Days "The Tender Bar will make you thirsty for that life -- its camaraderie, its hilarity, its seductive, dangerous wisdom." -- Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls "The best memoirs of his kind since Mary Karr wrote The Liars' Club ." -- New York Times "The best thing about The Tender Bar is that it is many stories in one. -- Entertainment Weekly J.R. Moehringer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a former Niemann Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in Denver, Colorado. Read more
Features & Highlights
- A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a barJ .R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.+s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something more, something he couldn+t name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a grand old New York saloon that was a sanctuary for all types of men-cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar-including J.R.+s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; Joey D, a soft-hearted brawler; and Cager, a war hero who raised handicapping horses to an art-taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. When the time came for J.R. to leave home, the bar became a way station-from his entrance to Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student way out of his element; to his introduction to tragic romance with a woman way out of his league; to his stint as a copy boy at the New York Times, where he was a faulty cog in a vast machine way out of his control. Through it all, the bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality-until at last the bar turned J.R. away.Riveting, moving, and achingly funny, The Tender Bar is at once an evocative portrait of one boy+s struggle to become a man, and a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.
