“THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” By Dwight Garner

“THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” By Dwight Garner

Picador 256 pages paperback $19.00

ISBN: 13 978 125 0338365

New York City author, Dwight Garner, a senior book reviewer for The New York Times has published his second book, “The Upstairs Delicatessen On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating while Reading,” now available in paperback. If you have detected a bit of humor in Garner’s subtitle you have caught on to Garner’s forte: wit and humor.

Garner, a native of West Virginia, who grew up in Florida, then after college at Middlebury College, in Vermont, has made New York City, and the New York metropolitan area his home for decades. He has some down-to-earth, Southern tastes in food and literature, favoring the barbecue his family introduced him to in the rural South, and earthy, Southern authors, including Barry Hannah and Harry Crews.

Previously, Garner, a former senior editor for The New York Times Book Review, and current book critic there, released a book of quotations: Garner’s Quotations. This new book, “The Upstairs Delicatessen” follows up on the previous one as it presents a smorgasbord of witty quotations and humorous ripostes. Garner, after marrying a schoolmate from Middlebury, became a bit of a foodie, as his wife is the daughter of a prominent chef. This appetite for the good tastes in life, coupled with a penchant for humor, has led to Garner stirring up one of the funniest books of recent years.

Readers may find themselves dog-earing pages and annotating in pencil the best places that leave them chuckling. Reading Dwight Garner’s new book should bring many smiles through the first half of the book, with asides like this one, which mentions Michael Pollan and other food writers who Garner notes their “sounding sanctimonious.” Then Garner casually interjects “God bless them,” as he notes Pollan’s advice to eat “Mostly plants.” Then Garner segways to “Lee Harvey Oswald lived on burgers and Cokes.” Then Garner skips to comedian Bill Burr as a bridge to Garner’s own take on fast food: “Fast Food World” leads to “detaching from the literate world.” Then Garner unfurls one of many witty ripostes: “Here the menus are pictures, as if they were crime-scene photos.” Before a quick quotation to literary scholar “Terry Eagleton”: “Genuine eating combines pleasure . . . sociality and so differs . . . in much the same way that Proust differs from a bus ticket.”

Just a bit further down the page, Garner continues riffing by mentioning David Mamet’s book Writing in Restaurants, which “contains surprisingly little about writing in restaurants.” Funny! Further along after offering more information on Mamet’s observations, Garner presents lighter faire: “Richard Russo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, writes regularly in cafes and sometimes in a Denny’s” Then its over to playwright August Wilson, “who wrote some of his plays . . . at an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips.” And Garner follows this with “Nicholson Baker has worked in Friendly’s.” If you as a reader are not at least smiling by now, perhaps you may be hungry?

Past the mid-point of his book, Dwight Garner begins a new chapter: “Interlude: A Swim, or a Nap” with a quotation from Ursula K. Le Guin: “Go to bed; tired is stupid.” At this point, it seems Garner has wearied of mere wit and humor and delicious quotations and has decided he must include something with more depth within his literary romp. That something seems most welcome as Garner ventures to address the transcendent beauty within literature. The first work Garner addresses, John Cheever’s well-known short story “The Swimmer” parallels Garner’s own enthusiasm for swimming, his Florida upbringing, and adventures in the aquatic.

Garner never loses sight of his affinity for literature, nor does he ever become high brow or snooty; he remains a man of nature as he writes: “When I was a teenager, I hadn’t yet read John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer,” but I’d lived it in my own nocturnal, vaguely criminal sort of way.” Garner then offers a fine summary of Cheever’s story, with some mention of the film version featuring Burt Lancaster. Then Garner returns to his own autobiography, while offering a little appetizer in linguistics that behooves a book critic for The New York Times.

“There’s no verb for traveling while hopping from swimming pool to swimming pool. Perhaps ‘cheevering’ would suffice. During the summers of my youth, late at night, my friends and I would cheever through my neighborhood. Nearly every house had a rectangular or kidney-shaped pool out back. We’d make a circuit of dozens of these pools–quietly unlatching the screen doors, swimming from end to end in the dark, then tiptoeing out the screen doors on the other side.” Sometimes he and his friends brought girlfriends along or a “six-pack of beer.”

Preceding this admission of this foray into the clandestine, Garner offers insight into John Cheever’s fiction, and this glistens as one of the highlights within Garner’s new book. “The Upstairs Delicatessen” offers the delight of an appetizing and well-prepared repast for those who enjoy both reading and eating, as his subtitle asserts. In Garner’s summary of Cheever’s “The Swimmer” Garner appropriately notes “The swim starts out promisingly. Along the way there are cocktails to consume, friends to embrace, old lovers who might be glad to see him. . . . As Neddy moves along, we begin to realize his mind has come unstitched. He’s lost everything that matters to him. “The Swimmer” is a story I relish, in part, for its hymns to swimming, life’s best activity that doesn’t take place in the bedroom or the kitchen. I am beside Neddy when he thinks, ‘That he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.” This touches the watery and transcendent beauty in life and in literature.

From espousing the virtues of hot dogs early on in his this book, and recounting adventures in swimming from his youth, Dwight Garner ventures across Manhattan to the where he admits to some local “cheevering” setting out first on subway: “I spent my morning at the rooftop pool of the Gansevoort, a luxury hotel in the meat-packing district,” where he enjoys a view of “lower Manhattan and the new Whitney Museum.” This adventure was facilitated by Garner’s editors at Esquire magazine.

But early in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” on a family road trip, Garner admits to tastes far more pedestrian: coffee. After weeks of “truck stop coffee” Garner and family welcome the mere site of one America’s ubiquitous Starbuck’s. Dwight Garner questions: “Is Starbuck’s elitist?” Then he introduces Long Island’s own now infamous son, author: “Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced former Fox News host, used to brag he never went to Starbuck’s because he preferred a local Long Island coffee shop ‘where cops and fireman hang out.’” Then Garner counters or balances O’Reilly’s “reverse snobbery” with a remark from Michael Kinsley in Slate: “Cops and fireman like good coffee too! And they can afford it.” Kinsley goes on and calls Starbuck’s “one of the great democratizing institutions of our time.” Then Kinsley suggests O’Reilly visit, and calls him a “snob.”

Such are the coffee and culture wars in this the first quarter of the 21st century. Garner even offers his personal tip on preparing “Campbell’s Tomato Soup,” a down-to-earth classic. Dwight Garner, in his penultimate chapter “Drinking,” with good sense, prefers a good martini shaken at home. With his family, after a day in the office, or at the pool, or in the fast-food restaurant, where he finishes his reviews when “on deadline,” Garner, with an ear for the music of domestic life offers that the sound of him shaking his canister as he mixes his martini as a call to the dinner table for the evening meal.

He mentions authors as varied as Cormac McCarthy, MFK Fisher, Philip Roth, Brooklyn’s own memoirist Philip Lopate, and others as varied as Larry McMurtry, Pauline Kael, Julia Child, and the serious British drinker, Kingsley Amis, father of Martin. Dwight Garner also includes many references to the Michigan and Montana writer, Jim Harrison, along with a writer synonymous with New York, and The New Yorker magazine, Roger Angell. But ultimately, along with all the literary allusions, Dwight Garner’s enjoyable “The Upstairs Delicatessen” remains a book about Dwight Garner and food, and his book is best enjoyed before one ventures into the kitchen to prepare a favorite American dish.