Review by Booklist Review
Renowned New York Times book critic Garner doesn't live below a delicatessen. The phrase "upstairs delicatessen" was coined by Beat critic Seymour Krim to describe memory, and Garner raids his to serve up a feast of vivid recollections personal and literary. Reading and eating have been symbiotic passions for Garner since he was a child in West Virginia, and eventually these "combined gluttonies" inspired him to keep track of writers who write about food. All converges in this zesty concoction of funny and poignant autobiographical anecdotes, incisive and wide-ranging reflections, and striking, often hilarious quotes from a literary smorgasbord, all baked into chapters dedicated to the day's meals, food shopping, drinking, napping, and, curiously, swimming. Coffee, for example, elicits references to Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler, Honoré de Balzac, Søren Kierkegaard, M. F. K. Fisher, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Christopher Sorrentino, John Steinbeck, Laurie Colwin, Richard Brautigan, Frank O'Hara, Charles Wright, Namwali Serpell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Charlie Kaufman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Jennifer Egan. The ravenously well-read Garner is witty, confiding, provocative, and adept in his considerations of fast food (including a stint working at Domino's), high-tech modernist cuisine, dinner parties, martinis, his cookbook-writer wife, Cree LeFavour, and her foodie family, and his life as a book critic stoked and sustained by food and story.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times book critic Garner (Read Me) meanders through a lifetime of eating--from boyhood mayo-and-cheese sandwiches to the French bouillabaisses of middle age--and summons wordsmiths from Thackeray to Houellebecq in this amusing mix of memoir, criticism, and cultural history. The loose-limbed text is arranged into sections that contemplate the three daily meals, drinks (Garner concurs with H.L. Mencken, who said, "The martini is the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet"), grocery shopping, the sadness of eating alone in a restaurant, and the ideal setup for a dinner party (six to eight guests at a round table so that no one is marooned in a conversational dead zone between two bores). Garner's own knockabout memories are happily omnivorous and often amusing: "I read novels while stuffing myself with Drake's Ring Dings, tubs of Cheez Balls, single-serving bags of Famous Amos cookies," he writes of an early job working the late shift at an Exxon near the Everglades. "I rarely, I am sorry to admit, rang these morsels up on the cash register." His literary analyses, which see him examining roadkill in Cormac McCarthy's novels and pickles in Salman Rushdie's, are likewise delicious. Garner dishes up a plethora of tasty morsels for literary foodies to nosh on. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The longtime critic for the New York Times follows Garner's Quotations with a more specialized sequel of the culinary sort, featuring plenty of literary insight. "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," writes Garner. "The book you're holding is a product of these combined gluttonies." Whether nestled at home with a magazine and a sandwich or stretched out on the floor of a local bookstore that allowed customers to peruse with a six-pack of beer in tow, the author has plotted a course through life that has included many of these mutual indulgences. An "omnidirectionally hungry human being," Garner has always paid attention to what has entered and exited the mouths and minds of writers. The narrative passes seamlessly between quotes and stories of literary and cultural greats, and this undeniably enjoyable wander through digestive habit has absurd and hilarious heights. One particular highlight is a brief tangent on Mario Puzo, of Godfather fame, leaving a Swiss "fat farm," taking a cab 300 miles, and breaking his fast with a Parisian pizza. Chapters proceed through the major and minor meals of the day and can blend at times into a culinary reverie. Garner's wit and dexterity with a quote will keep any reader with something tasty to eat or drink in hand captivated at least until they run out of snacks. The author offers something to sate any hunger for culinary minutiae. "I read," he notes, "out of an accelerated sense of what Tina Brown, in her Vanity Fair Diaries, called 'observation greed.' I've looked to novels and memoirs and biographies and diaries and cookbooks and books of letters for advice about how to live, the way cannibals ate the brains of brilliant captives, seeking to grow brilliant themselves." A wonderful mix of culinary memoir, literary reference, how-to in indulgence. Grab some snacks and dig in. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
