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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Woodburn Public Library | 381.147 Howe 2010 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 381.147 Howe, B. 2010 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
This warm and funny tale of an earnest preppy editor finding himself trapped behind the counter of a Brooklyn convenience store is about family, culture and identity in an age of discombobulation.
It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review , agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws' Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton's Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store's tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift--and the family--while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.
Author Notes
Ben Ryder Howe has written for The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , and Outside , and his work has been selected for Best American Travel Writing . He is a former senior editor of The Paris Review . He, his wife, and their two children live on Staten Island. My Korean Deli is his first book.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Abandoning the rat race, Howe, a former editor at the Paris Review, and his wife buy a New York City deli for Howe's Korean mother-in-law in this charming memoir. Bronson Pinchot can be engaging, and he maintains the wit, energy, and momentum of the prose. He shifts character voices quite successfully, particular within scenes that take place at the deli. but his attempts at Korean accents, especially his vocalizing of his mother-in-law, are so broad and caricatured as to be almost unbearable. A Holt hardcover. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When editor-by-day Howe goes along with his wife's idea to buy and start up a Brooklyn deli as a gift for her Korean-immigrant mother, saying he had no idea what he was getting into would be a vast understatement. He certainly didn't know how hard it would be to find a great deli in their price range, to staff the place, to operate a cash register, or to keep the regular customers happy. Poking fun at everything from his stereotypically WASP upbringing to his tank (he said it ) of a mother-in-law's hard-headed workaholism and lacking an ounce of sentimentality, Howe artfully lends the reader a keen interest in his and his family's success. Surmounting calamity upon calamity with the kind of tunnel-vision only family disasters can engender, Howe paddles to keep life afloat at home, the deli, and his day job at the Paris Review. From his former unenviable position at the bottom of a pile of problems, Howe has created a smartly measured and propulsive read.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S hard not to fall in love with "My Korean Deli." First, it's the (very) rare memoir that places careful, loving attention squarely on other people rather than the author. Second, it tells a rollicking, made-for-the-movies story in a wonderfully funny deadpan style. By the end, you'll feel that you know the author and his family quite well - even though you may not be eager to move in with them. The book opens in the autumn of 2002 with Ben Ryder Howe, then an editor at The Paris Review, riding around New York with his mother-in-law, Kay, "the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers," looking at locations for the delicatessen his family has decided to buy - or, more accurately, his wife, Gab, has decided to buy, in order to occupy her mother and repay her for the heroic self-sacrifice of moving her family from Korea and slaving to send her daughter to the University of Chicago, where she and Howe met as 20-year-olds. Gab, who is turning 30, feels she has accomplished nothing in life, despite earning two graduate degrees and working as a corporate lawyer. So she tells her husband she's quitting her job. Instead of using the $30,000 they have saved to liberate themselves from their apartment in her parents' Staten Island basement, they'll put it into a deli. The quick profits, she assures him, will soon pay for a house of their own. It's immediately clear that no one except Kay, who for 20 years has been a clerk at various 7-Elevens and Stop 'n' Gos, is the least bit suited to working at a convenience store, let alone running one. Aside from a summer job pumping gas, Howe has never done manual work and neither, presumably, have generations of his deeply WASP family, which remained so tied to the Plymouth Bay Colony that it stayed in Massachusetts for nearly 400 years. Unlike Dwayne, the longtime employee of the store in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, that the family eventually buys, who has a gift for knowing when city inspectors are descending for a sting, Howe has a sixth sense that isn't much use: "I can look at someone and tell if they've been to boarding school." Howe's working life has been spent in another basement, George Plimpton's, toiling in a world where family connections and schools matter as much, and maybe more, than actual ability. The idea of risk - real risk, of the kind his in-laws faced every day in their new country, in which actual survival depends on getting and holding a job - strikes him as "an antidote" to The Paris Review's "make-believe world (poems! stories!) inside a bubble of privilege." Running a convenience store will be Howe's version of climbing the Himalayas or, though he never makes the comparison, of his boss's attempt to play professional football. (When Plimpton hears about Howe's plan, he doesn't object. He just insists that he be allowed to work as a stock boy for a day.) The first months bring one disaster after another. Inevitably, it's Kay or her daughter who saves the day. Gab tracks down the former owner in Nevada after they learn he sold them $88,000 worth of taxes and fines along with the lease. Paragraph by paragraph, she decodes and eviscerates the coffee contract Willy Loman, as they call the salesman, nearly gets Howe to sign. Gab also puts the family on an austerity budget and, when the reality of their "profits" sinks in, takes a job doing legal work for a bank. Howe keeps a distanced view and writes with a light, self-effacing touch, describing his frustration with customers who refuse to accept any changes in the coffee, the prices or where the bran muffins and Bud Light are shelved, or his feeling of being trapped in the "scruffy milieu of lottery tickets, wine coolers and penny candy." But he doesn't express anger or disdain: he remains carefully even-tempered, befitting his upbringing as the child of a cultural anthropologist. But how does he put up with the Korean in-laws who treat doors as if they aren't there, with a wife and a mother-in law given to ruthless decision-making and impatience? Very seldom does he let his "snob siren" go off or point out the disparity between the regulars who "lend the store an atmosphere similar to that of an off-track betting parlor" and the people at The Paris Review. And if he does, it's typically in the form of self-criticism - about, for instance, his initial inability to sell subscriptions when Plimpton sends him to a Chicago book fair: "At a deli you don't really try to sell people things; instead, you act as if you want to kill them." Howe won't say whether he shares that anger. He's, always extremely sharp - and unexpectedly funny in a way that will remind readers of Ian Frazier, surely one of his inspirations. As much as "My Korean Deli" is an introduction to the constant obstacle course that is the life of a small-business operator, it's finally a portrait of two people Howe comes to understand much better through his own travails. His mother-in-law, who won't and can't stop working, is humorless and unembarrassable (holding up condoms at a wholesaler's and loudly demanding to know which customers will like better, ribbed or studded), but she's also unhesitatingly generous. Howe's other employer, George Plimpton, may seem like an aged frat boy who has lost his way, both as the leader of a defiantly unprofessional magazine and as a writer who can't make progress on his own memoir, but he's also a brilliant editor who doesn't stop caring, who's always eager to be surprised. Howe comes to see the joyous amateurism he had soured on as both an inspiration and a daily effort that, like Kay's, always needs to be in productive motion. That fresh embrace of discovery keeps "My Korean Deli" moving as fast as it does. And although Howe would never say so himself, his new life fully achieves the sort of risky adventure Plimpton only dabbled at. 'At a deli you don't really try to sell people things; instead you act as if you want to kill them.' Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic His most recent book is "The Pleasures of Slow Food."