After my third reading of Garner’s eccentric bricolage of literary anecdote and autobiography, I did come up with a few qualifications. First, not everyone is going to enjoy this book. I can list the people in my life, all skinny, who will see no appeal whatsoever in strolling down the aisles of Stop & Shop with a free-associating book critic ... Occasionally Garner shoehorns in a quotation or anecdote too many. Does Jessica Mitford’s mother’s comment that giving birth feels like having an orange forced up your nostril really enhance Garner’s meditation on a supermarket citrus display? Perhaps not. But this excess of enthusiasm, this desire to cram in one more excellent line, even if it doesn’t quite fit, underscores the book’s ethos of gusto ... For those of us who live to read and eat, this book is a feast.
Winning ... Garner is a good host; he doesn’t just talk about himself ... Memoir, thoughts about food, and literary criticism are stacked, in The Upstairs Delicatessen, like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie ... Garner’s literary cellar is vast, and he always has just the right quote or anecdote ready to decant.
Garner hops from one fun fact or anecdote to the next with the agility of a seasoned server replacing one dish with another without the customer's detection ... This high-spirited charmer is a rambunctious ramble across food touchstones from literature, writers' lives, and the author's own experience.
