With the high-spirited charmer The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading, book critic Dwight Garner merges two loves of his life, although the union didn't require much of a mental leap. As he puts it, "Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together."
The narrative is a rambunctious ramble across food touchstones from literature, writers' lives, and Garner's own experience. Shaped by his 1970s childhood in the South, Garner's tastes run toward the proudly unconventional and resolutely fuss-free (e.g., he's "on the record as being perhaps America's most ardent consumer of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich"). Chapters are organized by each of the three daily meals, plus there's a chapter dedicated to shopping and another to alcoholic drinks. Readers should be forewarned not to look for anything on dinner's last course: "I don't have a sweet tooth, so no dessert," the author explains in an expectations-defying hit-and-run.
Garner doesn't need to tell readers that he has kept "a sentry lookout for the food in literature" for what seems to have been the entirety of his reading life. Throughout The Upstairs Delicatessen, he provides a running commentary on writers' food fancies, as well as those of their characters. Garner crowns Émile Zola's The Belly of Paris "Western literature's great groceries novel." He paraphrases George Orwell's philosophy on tea, and reproduces a paragraph on soft-boiled egg-making in Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon. He states that "Updike was a pickle guy," whereas Barbara Kingsolver was probably no egg salad woman: Garner approvingly offers the line "Hell is other people, with egg salad" from her novel Unsheltered.
Garner hops from one fun fact or anecdote to the next with the agility of a seasoned server replacing one dish with another without the customer's detection. He has already proved himself to be the great aggregator with Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements and Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany; but in The Upstairs Delicatessen, Garner becomes a character appealing enough to rival those conceived by the writers he references. "This is a message that a meal always imparts: Life, for now, will go on," he insists at one point--a mollifying distillation that is an argument for both eating well and reading The Upstairs Delicatessen. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: This high-spirited charmer is a rambunctious ramble across food touchstones from literature, writers' lives, and the author's own experience.