BookBrowse Reviews The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

A classic American story of self-invention and escape. Memoir

From the book jacket: J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice.

At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. Cops and poets, bookies and soldiers, movie stars and stumblebums, all sorts of men gathered in the bar to tell their stories and forget their cares. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood-by-committee.

Comment: The Tender Bar is a gorgeous memoir in the tradition of coming of age biographies such as Angela's Ashes and All Over But The Shoutin'. If you're thinking that you can't see the attraction in reading about a boy 'brought up' in a bar take a look at some of the reviews at BookBrowse, including 3 starred pre-publication reviews. 

A couple of the critics complained that Moehringer rubbed too many of the rough edges off the lives of the men who frequent Dickens (on the assumption that a group of men who spend most of their free waking hours in the bar are unlikely to be leading trouble-free lives), but I would argue that Moehringer is writing an ode to the culture of the local pub that was such an integral part of his childhood, and the men who became his surrogate fathers - and while he himself grew to be unhappy with his drinking habits and slowly grew away from the bar, there is no reason for him to pull the rug on those who loved him and supported him by exposing them "warts and all", especially as his awareness of such faults would probably have come from him retrospectively as an adult.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2005, and has been updated for the August 2006 edition. Click here to go to this issue.