Bodega Bourgeois
ON HIS FIRST day working at his recently purchased Brooklyn deli, as he struggles with a package of Wonder bread stubbornly refusing to reveal its price, Ben Ryder Howe is generously reassured by a customer: "Don’t worry about it. Everybody here is new at some point. That’s what makes New York so great." This pep talk is followed by an apparently genuine—though, in the context of Howe’s memoir, ludicrous—query: "What country are you from?" For Howe is, as he is tirelessly prone to noting, as American as one can possibly be. His ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, he is a WASP through and through and given to excessive, if not pathological, self-questioning, committed to stability, containment and selfconcealment.
So how did this former boardingschool student and editor at The Paris Review, accustomed to spending his days line-editing short fiction by Nobel laureates, come to stand behind the counter of a small deli on the corner of Hoyt and Atlantic? How did a Korean deli come to be his?
The story begins when Howe’s wife Gab, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides, on the verge of turning 30, that she must repay her mother’s many sacrifices by purchasing a deli with the money the couple had been saving to buy a house, working at the store until it has become financially stable, then giving it to the mother as a gift. How Howe might feel about this particular turn of events is addressed only obliquely: Like Gab, he is at a crossroads of sorts, no longer uncomplicatedly, unreservedly fulfilled by what was once a dream job, longing to take a real risk, to test his mature mettle. The idea of running a deli—that most immigrant of pursuits—strikes him as his chance to fully prove himself to Gab’s family, especially his indefatigable motherin-law, who never fails, in her nearly superhuman strength, to make Howe feel inadequate. Though this explanation carries the distinct whiff of after-the-fact elucidation, when he is not self-consciously attempting to make sense of the events, Howe seems inexorably propelled by the far more forceful will of Gab and Kay, whose decisions—no matter their effect on Howe’s life—are binding.
The trajectory of My Korean Deli largely conforms to this formula. Things happen to Howe, and Howe admirably adjusts to things happening. It is not so much that he goes with the flow; rather, he examines the circumstances, considers the contributing factors and takes stock of the manifold differences between himself and others. And there are many, many "others" here; one of the pleasures of the
memoir is its sheer scope of otherness. Howe takes in his inlaws and their extensive extended family; his fellow Paris Review editors, most of whom are young, idealistic and almost comically ill-equipped to run a serious publication; his deli customers, split among the neighborhood old-timers and the newly arrived Brooklynites; and all the various suppliers and hangers-on of the struggling deli owner. Some of the portraits—say, of George Plimpton, the benevolent despot of the Review, making drinks in his boxers during meetings in his living room, or of Dwayne, the half-menacing, half-gregarious deli employee—are curiously vivid and simultaneously predictable, relying on a memoir-formula, but somehow ringing true despite that.
Howe’s strength as a memoirist is, arguably, his adherence to a rule he cites early on. Discussing Elements of Style, a gift from his father, he notes Strunk and White’s exhortation to "place yourself in the background." The background of My Korean Deli—with Deli its subterranean world of deli-ownership (creepy wholesale warehouses and semi-legal cigarette stockpiles, arcane city rules, arbitrarily but draconically enforced), its intimations of culture clash (repeatedly invoked but notquite-satisfyingly explored) and its awkwardly charming belief in New York as a place of anxiety-provoking possibilities—might overtake a less modest man; Howe, with his WASP constraint, wisely refrains from competing, and his memoir is the better for it. Having stumbled into deliownership, Howe makes the best of the indignities of his new normal, including his frustratingly open-ended residency at his mother-in-law’s Staten Island home, keeping a low profile and apparently taking copious notes. And maybe this is the real purpose of the whole mad, maddening endeavor: the makings of this record, in which Howe is content to play the role of faithful scribe.