Lunch and Life Lessons with Dwight Garner

French onion soup for the soul

Books can poke holes in the real world, or at least make the material in it a bit porous. The stories and anecdotes and associations we find in books can turn the mundane matter of our lives into portals into other universes, other experiences we’ve had only on the page. To the extent that, for some of us loony toons, for whom life is spent reading as much as it is spent living, it is nearly impossible to walk down a grocery store aisle without our minds sharding off into commentary, associations, quotes, marginalia, and slivers of reflections on all of the ways in which a Campbell’s soup can or a jar of pickles, a sack of cornmeal, the fancy butters, particular strains of apples or peanut butter have been forever changed, expanded for us by the books we have read.

The writer and critic Dwight Garner is one such loon, and the grocery store analogy comes from incredible new book, The Upstairs Delicatessen, in which he spends an entire chapter trying to get through an afternoon visit to his local Stop & Shop while assailed and spirited away by the many Madeleines and other Proustian prompts he finds there. In a funny way, this shopping scene is an inside-out version of the delicatessen in the book’s title, the vibrantly lit cornucopia of delicacies Garner has collected in his mind from a lifetime spent reading — and eating, and reading about eating, and eating while reading, as he jokes. It is a phenomenal book, a food book that belongs on the highest shelf of esteem with Jim Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked. It is also one of the best articulations of this personal, critical, and hallucinatory quality of a reader’s mind.

Of course, Garner is a great reader, a mammoth reader for work, as the book critic of The New York Times, a position he’s held since 2008. And a reader of deep curiosity, as he has been since his youth — something he attributes to “observational greed,” a phrase from Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, a delicious little bit from the delicatessen, and important backstory to the mental machinery that has created his book. “We read for tangled, overlapping reasons,” he writes in the book. “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.”

For similar reasons, I suppose, I devoured this book, and then emailed Garner to see if perhaps he might like to get together (so that I might at least be in the presence of if not consume his brain). We met at a bistro on the Upper West Side — just north of what I think of as Nora Ephron-ville, or Thomas Pynchon zone, around the corner from where we all went to Joan Didion’s funeral — for lunch. French onion soup, an Arnold Palmer, and an espresso for him. Steak frites and a glass of cote du rhone for me. Garner teases himself for being on a second-day hangover, which is rare, he says. “I like drinking so much that I'm really careful with it,” he says, “because I don't want to have to quit.” He went out, big, with his son a couple days prior, and toward the end of the night, as he began tabulating the bill in his brain, he says, “I was thinking I could have bought him a new overcoat or something. But we’re going to remember this night our whole lives,” he says, “because we had some really cool things to eat. I just feel like, it was an event for the morale of both of our lives. Don't you feel that way sometimes?”

I do, and try to tell him so, try to explain that that is precisely what we are doing here, why I wanted to meet him, because he fanned back to flame some little pilot lights in my life that I thought had perhaps gone out for good, post-pandy, that his book made me want to live again, rather than just be alive. It is that kind of book. And he is that kind of writer — who in a recent review of a book about the good old days of publishing, writes that “all the martinis came in triplicate” — whose truly toothsome joy makes you want to crawl out of your cave and sit at the end of the bar and just dig all the deliciousness available in the world. Which is, of course, the very spirit of the book itself.

“I'm very suggestible,” Garner says over lunch. “Whenever I read something in a book, I can't wait to go try it. Just this morning, I was reading a historical cookbook and a woman said the only way she eats oysters is with black pepper. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I've liked oysters for 30 years. I've never heard of putting black pepper on an oyster.’ So now I'm going to hunt a place to try that, maybe I'll do it tonight. But life is like that, isn't it? We're all just… Is it fear of missing out? Is it that banal? Maybe it is. I just feel like we're all on this hunt. If we're going to live anyway, why not enjoy it?”

Beyond just the magical communication of this joy, in living, eating, and reading, I wonder, too, if Upstairs Delicatessen isn’t, like, “important” — as in, fundamental to understanding our particular time, when everyone is both a critic and a personal brand, expressing themselves through their tastes, differentiating (and selling) based on the super specific snowflake beauty of their minds and collected affinities. Being as it is about the way our consciousness works right now, about how we understand the things in our lives, the book is also an incredible picture of the functions of criticism, which I think may be my favorite art form, and which of course has meant the world to Garner in his life. As he says, “When I was a kid, I loved finding the critics. I grew up in an upper middle-class family. I had tennis lessons and orthodonture. We just didn't have a lot of books in the house. We weren’t a very cultural family. So I would read all these books and have no one to talk with about them. I loved to read criticism because there was someone who could fill my mind up with ideas about what they felt reading it and I could talk back to in my own mind.”

We talk a lot about the way media has changed, about what a critic’s byline in Time magazine meant back when, about discovering people of like mind through magazines — about moving to the New York we’d read about because that was where we were going to find our people — and about where to find the good stuff now. Before he joined the Times as a critic, Garner was an editor at The New York Times Book Review and a founding editor at Salon (the first big web magazine, which he says he started before he had an email address). Like Jim Harrison, he had a wonderful, long-running, roving column for Esquire. And he is still a ravenous consumer of all media, on various platforms. “I fucking love Tik-Tok,” he says. “It is the world talking to itself. And I like seeing what crazy things people are doing with Ring Dings. It's weird. It's Americana. It's life,” he says. “If you’re not interested in Tik-Tok, you’re not interested in humanity.” Of magazines, he says, “I'm a back-of-the-book reader. Any magazine I pick up, I'm right to the back of the book. I like funny. To me, wit is brainpower. If I pick up the New Yorker, I always go to Anthony Lane first, because I know it's going to be funny.”

Recently, a writer described Garner as a sort of low-key Jim Harrison character. Which he loves. “Harrison’s a hero of mine,” Garner says, “but I don't have a bottomless tank like he did. I love my pleasures, but I can't eat 30 courses on a regular basis. He could. He could drink two bottles of wine and be fine. I drink one bottle and I'm under the table.” But even Harrison, this great Falstaffian character, was always writing crankily about the diets he was on. And Garner is very funny in the book and in life about diets.

“I'm on diets all the time,” he says over lunch. “I've done the Cabbage Soup Diet. I've done the Atkins thing. Lately, I've done Lose It, which is an app that helped me lose about 25 pounds about a year ago. I probably gained about nine of them back. But I hate it. I don't get it. I'm 58, which a little bit old, but not that old. And I've been married for 30 years to a beautiful, brilliant woman whom I love. And still I am vain as shit. It stuns me that I have friends now who are literary guys, 75, 80, who are still working on diets. I'm like, Jesus Christ, does it ever end?”

What will never end is Garner’s collecting of quotations. About food, and sex and violence. And bodily movements, viscera. “I'm an earthy reader,” he says. “I like reading earthy writing. And by that, I don't mean that it's not cerebral. I like cerebral writers writing about earthy things. Food, sex, living.” And all of that earth just seems to stick, he says. “It's funny. I don't have a great memory in general, but I have a nearly photographic memory for quotations.” He does make notes, too, he says. He has kept a commonplace book since he was a kid – a book, and a practice, that went a long way in informing Garner’s previous book of quotations that he has compiled over a lifetime of reading. “It's an addiction I have,” he says. “So when I go into a supermarket and I see apples, I have three or four things that I can't help but remember that I have read about apples. Or this coffee. I can't help not think about what Kierkegaard did with his coffee or how Orwell made tea or... So I was trying to evoke in print what goes through my mind while I'm eating or drinking.”

I wonder if food memories specifically imprint on our minds differently than do any, all others. I wonder how memories made second-hand, while reading, can be so vivid, more vivid even than so many of the experiences lived. Garner and I talk about Geoff Dyer’s notion, in his essay about having “reader’s block,” that the books read in one’s youth contribute so much more, percentagewise, to our understanding of the world than do the books read later on, and perhaps that is why they remain so important to us. Like the music we listen to in our teens. And yet food memories, whenever they are made, are indeed worth far more than overcoats, or whatever. And writing about food seems like such an ideal way to write about everything else, from culture to etiquette to class to metaphorical notions of restraint and indulgence…

“I think I've always wanted to write a kind of quasi memoir,” Garner says, “but I realized my life isn't interesting enough. I'm a fucking book critic. I've never been attacked by a bear. I've never been stomped by motorcycle gang, anything like that. So by bringing in this food aspect and other perspectives, I could really enrich it.”  

Toward the end of lunch, Garner brings up peaches (though not as an aside about Andre Aciman, alas). About wanting to put each of the precious fruits of your mental labor into a piece of criticism. Each lovely idea. “You have the space to fill every week, and I have 30 peaches, meaning ideas, I want to fit into it. And I used to try to get them all in there and end up smashing all the goddamn peaches. Now I finally have come to realize that no, you want the perfect five peaches that will fill this thing nicely.”

I do like the five perfect peaches, and then all the rest, plus the steak and the oysters and a partridge in a pear tree. But in keeping with his practice I will bite my tongue and spare you the at least 3987 further perfect pieces of produce Garner shared with me over our lovely lunch. Those, just a tiny fraction he keeps in the deli upstairs, where, mercifully, we can visit him through the book, any time.