BookDragon Blog

I swear this it not a spoiler because it’s on the dedication page: Dwayne dies. His dates are right there before the book even starts: “1968-2009.” Which is really quite sad, because inherited employee Dwayne Wright is one of the two most colorful Characters (capital intended!) in this rollicking, everyone-gets-sardonically-skewered memoir about the sometimes unintended adventures of owning and operating a Brooklyn Korean deli. That other Character is the writer’s mother-in-law, Kay, who the writer introduces on the first page as “the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers.”

That writer, Ben Ryder Howe, is a former senior editor for The Paris Review. Yes, Paris Review – as in quite possibly the most important literary journal ever, at least in English. No, he’s not Korean (in spite of his Korean deli); he’s a Mayflower descendant, raised by “modern-day Puritans … with a technophobic aversion to thinks like dental floss.” His cultural anthropologist father taught him in ninth grade that The Elements of Style was not a book about writing, but “actually about character – specifically, how to be a crusty old man.” The crusty old man, “bizarrely, thrilled” by the news of his son’s entrepreneurial plans, responds with, “‘Could be an interesting experience … sort of an ethnography, a participatory study into the lives of the urban underclass.'” Nope, no comment there.

Howe, unlike his self-isolating ancestors, met and married way beyond his WASP lineage: his University of Chicago sweetheart Gab Pak is the daughter of Korean immigrants. In order to save money, the couple moves into Gab’s mother’s Staten Island basement. Gab, a former corporate Manhattan attorney, channels her fast approaching “thirtieth-birthday paranoia … into an obsession for repaying her mother’s sacrifice” for giving up everything she knew in Korea and immigrating to the U.S. to provide promising futures for her children. Howe observes (with great wit) as Gab transfers the couple’s life savings into opening a business for her mother (in which the whole family will exhaustively participate) – and their lives are never quite the same again.

One warning: read Howe’s multi-layered, memorably humorous, oh-so-cleverly-written first book for yourself; don’t bother with the disappointing audible version! Alas, Bronson Pinchot’s mispronunciations just grate. For an actor whose big break came from playing a heavily accented immigrant (Perfect Strangers), that he couldn’t step into one of the ubiquitous Korean delis throughout NYC (where he is apparently based) for a quick mini-lesson strikes me as irresponsible. Regardless of his geographical location, his producers could (should!) surely have made a single phone call to just one of the estimated 90 million Koreans throughout the world. Really?!! Really!!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011