Reading and eating

April's delight (and disappointment)

Leonora Kathleen Green, Coupons Required (1941)

The highlight for me this month was Dwight Garner’s The Upstairs Delicatessen, which I heartily recommend to others whose twin passions are eating and reading. I usually enjoy Garner’s reviews in the New York Times Book Review but I didn’t know much about the man himself, so it took me by surprise to read this line early on in The Upstairs Delicatessen and feel a kinship so powerful it can only be described as love: 

“To this day, I find the cuboid bits of crunchy salt at the bottom of certain pretzel bags almost unholy in their deliciousness, worthy of cutting on a mirror, snorting, and rubbing on the gum line.” 

Ha! Yes! Same! I thought, looking around in vain for someone to whom I could read the line aloud. (There was no one.) It’s not merely amusing; the sentence is a sign to the reader that this writer’s appetites tilt toward the obsessive, the decadent, the unapologetic. Thank god — I live in California and cherish all forms of hippie food, but I’ve had enough Michael Pollan for one lifetime. Garner’s appetite for books is similarly rapacious, though perhaps slightly more discerning, so one experiences in this volume a wide spectrum of voices as well as flavors.

Garner is a fluid, funny, honest writer, and he manages to turn what could have been a twee stocking stuffer — the subtitle of the book is “On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading” — into an engaging personal account and breathtaking compendium of quotations about food. (I do wonder how these were amassed. A younger writer might have sicced an AI tool on the job, and maybe Garner did, but I imagined a handwritten catalogue on graph paper, organized by food group.)

As the world grows more horrifying, I’ve doubled down on cooking, baking, fermenting, cookbook collecting and dog-earing. This weekend I countered an hour of doomscrolling with a walk through a local spice shop, where I bought yuzu salt and celery-flavored bitters in an attempt to reimagine Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, a childhood favorite. I added these to celery juice and seltzer and drank my creation while finishing Garner’s book, experiencing as I did so a momentary peace.

If you love eating with a book in your hand, savoring a scene with a meal at its center, revisiting MFK Fisher, or poring over cookbooks, you’ll appreciate The Upstairs Delicatessen. The line I love most likens pretzel salt to cocaine, but the book had a mildly tranquilizing effect on me. It’s rich, substantial, and comforting, a literary slice of lasagna.

This month I also read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a novel that has drawn breathless praise. One blurb, in a seeming parody of the form, claims the book is “so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe.” I hope that person is okay.

I really admire Akbar’s poetry, but this, his debut novel, didn’t totally do it for me. It did help me (I say this in a non-shitty way) isolate a number of qualities in popular literary fiction that I find irksome: multiple character voices that all sound the same and all sound like they could only have been generated in the present moment; ultra-contemporary narrators debating the relative wokeness of old books (“Adrienne Rich was a TERF”); an excess of AA-derived spiritual questing; and swaths of text striving for zany brilliance that instead feel loose, incoherent, or unedited. 

Reviewers apparently feel otherwise, as every appraisal of the book I could find mentions the rigor or precision of Akbar’s prose. “It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising,” wrote Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. In the New York Review of Books, Francine Prose called it “a meticulously written novel.” This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I’m losing my mind (and it happens often). The consensus of mainstream reviewers coheres around an expression of the very opposite of what I believe is true about a book and I’m left wondering whether I’m insane or whether these reviewers see what I see but repress it and end up unconsciously giving voice to the inverse opinion in their glowing reviews. (Okay, maybe that’s insane??) 

Martyr! is about Cyrus, a well-meaning, newly sober narcissist/sad sack poet in a state of existential and ethical crisis. Born in Iran, Cryus came to the the Midwest as a child after his mother’s plane was shot down accidentally by the U.S. military. He’s obsessed with the idea of martyrdom, the possibility of a meaningful death, and begins researching a book on the topic, interviewing a mysterious Iranian artist in the process who may not be who she appears to be.

The narrator, Cyrus, is compelling and the plot imaginative. There are many beautiful moments in the novel. When a good poet sprawls out over a few hundred prose pages, it’s no surprise that beautiful lines and images crop up in profusion, but this alone doesn’t make for a deliberate or controlled narrative work. In fact, much of the figurative language in this book is reaching and inexact — it feels like what might emerge from a smart person’s mind an hour before his paper is due. In this novel, a woman’s face is “dusted with the cosmic jaggedness so often found on the dying,” stars “floated around like the last Cheerios in a bowl of black milk,” and “frozen trees throbbed.” The narrator “felt dizzy again from aliveness.” He finds himself “awash in the world and its checkboxes.” His father’s “anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones” — this line was quoted by multiple reviewers as evidence of dazzling talent, but it doesn’t land for me. Referring to post-9/11 racism, the narrator notes, “Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.” 

There are dashes of self-help discourse, even some jargon from media (or marketing): “This was such an evergreen wildness, to Cyrus, how strong his addict reflexes remained, in spite of his sobriety.” Pages later, it’s an “evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room.” There are also inconsistencies. Cyrus and his best friend refer to the Trump-like sitting president as “President Invective.” He’s described as “a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived.” In the next paragraph, the president is “insulated from birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied…” This is, I guess, another instance of poetic license, but it’s one of many moments when this reader stumbled over the linguistic effusiveness. Can a ghoul, evil by definition, also be dewy? I wondered, distracted from the story itself.

A number of characters’ perspectives are represented here over the course of decades, but all seem to have the same voice and sensibility. Cyrus’s uncle’s thoughts, for example — brought to us from 1984 during the Iran-Iraq War — sound just like the narrator’s: “She would never be what I was, a boy, a burgeoning man, with all the manlinesses, the tolerance for pain that implied.” Were we doing “manlinesses” in 1984? I don’t know. Does that matter? I also don’t know, but the ardency of the narration here often comes at the expense of verisimilitude. Like many popular novels of this moment, Martyr! often just feels like someone talking. That’s not always a bad thing, but the armature of this work is really interesting and rather intricate. It was a bummer to see a lack of variation in the material constructed around it.

I read others this month, including The Light Room by Kate Zambreno, which I may have to write something about, Winter Love by Han Suyin, which I loved, and The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, another food-centric book, though a trifle compared to the Garner.

Towers of books knee-high are stacked against one wall of my dining room. I have high hopes for May. Happy reading! 📚🌷🍰