It has been really difficult for me to engage in writing the last few weeks. I've been trying to write this review about The Tender Bar for a while and I couldn't. One of the reasons I can think of is this bilingual reality I've been living in the last year: while I speak and think in Portuguese, I listen and read mostly in English.
The last books I read were in English. That's ok, but writing in Portuguese about this last one has been a little tricky. The Tender Bar, a memoir by the American journalist J.R. Moehringer, was published in 2006 and it's about the childhood and early adult years of a man who was born and raised in Long Island, NYC. Not a classical book, like the others I've read before.
In this one, the language was very simple. Except for the chapters in which he talks about baseball (oh, my God! I think baseball is so boring!), structures and vocabulary were easy to understand. So I think that while I read this book, I thought about it in English too - not in my mother language. Maybe that's the reason why writing about it in Portuguese has been an impossible task (I know there might be other reasons, like the Brazilian elections, but let's not talk about it now). So, I decided I should give it a try and write this review in the same language I read it. Please, English speakers native who might be reading this review, forgive me for any mistake.
The Tender Bar was a very nice surprise. I didn't know the author and I ended up downloading the e-book because I saw there would be a reading club meeting at Central Park to discuss it. As usual, because I'm such a slow reader, I took longer to finish it and I didn't go to the meeting. I don't regret it, there will be others, but I'm glad I finished the book anyway.
The book is divided into two parts. The first one wasn't my favorite, although the issues the author brings up are very important and delicate: a child in the 70s who grew up in a dysfunctional family in the outskirts of NYC, and whose closest male examples were his grandparent, his uncle, and his uncle's friends.
J.R. Moehringer tells us about his life in his grandparent's decadent house, a place where his mother, after getting a divorce from his father, would always come back for lacking money and having nowhere else to go. A place where he lived with his aunt and several cousins (who were always running away from their violent husband and father), his uncle who worked at a bar, his dear grandmother and his grandfather who didn't give enough money for food to his wife, ignored the maintenance of the house and, every other weekend, had suspicious going outs.
We are introduced to two opposite worlds. First, the house, or the domestic life, where men were absent. When they were present, they were violent, drunk, or mean to women and children. The place where men were unhappy and always trying to run away from. Second, "the bar". The Dickens, later called Publicans, was literally the place where people hung out and drank alcohol, and a metaphor for the "outside world", the "non-family world", the opposition of domestic life.
This is the environment described in the first part of the book, in which the young J.R. Moehringer talks about how much he missed his father, the financial difficulties his single mother, judged by her own family, suffers to keep up with a job or even an apartment for them, the uncle who is either drunk or dealing with bets, and the grandfather who is mean to his grandmother, mother and aunt. The Moehringer boy assumes to himself his father role of taking care of his mother, at the same time he admires the men from the Publicans and wishes to be just like them.
The second part of the book I liked very much. We follow his almost-accidental-approval at Yale, where he feels completely dislocated when comparing himself with all those boys and girls from rich and well-educated families. Then, he tells about his first job at The New York Times and his romantic life. The most important though is his realization that the Publicans, where he spent most of his days and considered a place of comfort, amusement, and manhood, was leading him to repeat the same mistakes the men of his early life committed with his family and himself.
It is a beautiful book. The thing about memoirs, unlike autobiographies, is that they allow the author to select what and how they want to narrate. They have more freedom. I liked very much how J.R. Moehringer talks about manhood, alcoholism, and family. We see many women and women authors constantly talking about marriage, maternity, domestic life, and what it means to be a woman, but we rarely see men talking about these issues. Moehringer discusses what is to be a fatherless boy and his lonely pursuit to know what it means to be a man when all he has in his surroundings are broken men.
Another very interesting subject brought up by the author is his discovery as a writer. It starts in his childhood and his interest in books and encyclopedias kept in a cabinet in his grandparent's house. Then, in his teenage years, he starts working part-time in a bookshop, in Arizona, and the owners introduce him to American Literature. At Yale he tries to "upgrade" his acknowledgment in literature and writing, but he has absolutely no academic success. All he has is his love for literature, his admiration for the great American authors, and his will of writing about the world he knew and those men from the bar.
Moehringer starts his narrative with The Great Gatsby, because Manhasset, the place in Long Island where he was born and lived, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for East Egg. Other authors and characters are mentioned in the book, from Charles Dickens to Emily Dickinson. It's very delightful to read about this "high literature" mixed with bar conversations and the most ordinary people and events from the outskirts of NYC.
Absolutely a beautiful contemporary coming-of-age novel that I recommend.
If you're not interested in reading more than 400 hundred pages, there is an adaptation on Amazon Prime released in 2021, directed by George Clooney. I haven't seen it yet, but I intend to.
No Brasil, o livro foi to livro foi lançado em 2007, pela Editora Nova Fronteira, com o título Bar Doce Lar. Está disponível na Amazon Brasil. Se você leu até aqui, se interessou e gostaria de ler em português mesmo, clica nesse link aqui: Bar Doce Lar, de J.R. Moehringer
