Tamara Shopsin's Arbitrary Stupid Goal stands out for it's uniqueness. She grew up in a way that I secretly dreamed of while holed up in boring, beige, suburbia:
a) She grew up in The Village in NYC in the 70s/80s. We're almost the same age but, unfortunately for me, that's where the similarities end.
b) Her family owned a small grocery store, which they later turned into a small legendary restaurant. Both were referred to as "The Store".
c) Actual celebrities frequented her family's diner.
d) Her parents were super lax with rules. I think there was only one.
e) She had four other siblings.
f) The neighbourhood had many eccentric characters. There was always something interesting or unusual going on and someone interesting or unusual doing it.
This book is a collection of memories, most of which are about Willy (her father's unofficial mentor), the family businesses, and her family members (but mainly her parents).
Willy was one of the neighbourhood eccentric characters and a very close family friend who just had the most filthy mind, but always seemed to get away with his dirty old man lifestyle. He sounded very charming and magnetic, yet very dirty. He reminded me very much of Heather O'Neill's stories about her father's friends when she was growing up. Larger-than-life, unconventional, free-spirited, charismatic are all words that come to mind. But when he got old and started going senile, it was enough to break your heart.
The stories about the legendary family businesses were my favourite. You could just picture it all in perfect detail. The restaurant had hundreds of items on the menu since her dad, Kenny, was always experimenting. There were many rules at the restaurant. No ordering the same item as your neighbour. A standard response to a customer who said they were in a hurry? "Leave now - you'll be early." Restaurant reviews were banned. So were lots of people. In a world where business owners are falling over themselves trying to attract customers, her father would singlehandedly determine who he would allow to dine in their restaurant. There were many ways to fail at being a customer. There was lots of yelling from her dad (a brash, short-tempered chef) and lots of camaraderie from her mom (the happiest waitress ever who had an endearing habit of sliding into customers' booths to take their orders).
I found that other stories that form part of this collection just weren't quite as strong, though they were still good and definitely entertaining. I particularly liked the one about the crossword lady and if, for some reason, you have always wondered how to fold a napkin into a penis-with-balls sculpture, you can find a handy diagram on page 290.
Visually, the typography layout is unique and worth a mention. Most of the text doesn't fill the page. A paragraph or two may be on one page with a ton of white space below. The next paragraph will start on the following page. There are also a few diagrams and photos interspersed throughout. I still can't decide if this text formatting is cool or a bit try-hard. Basically, it reminds me of when you're in school and your teacher asks you to write ten pages, but you aren't quite sure how to fill that many pages, so you write in gigantic double-spaced loopy script to make it fill ten pages. However, if you had condensed it all down to normal size, you might actually have three pages of actual text. So, is this a 324-page book with really around 200 pages of text? Oh well. It's different and makes it easy to read, so I suppose I'm on board. It's just food for thought. Anyway, it's the substance of those words that really matters the most and there is certainly no lack of substance. And no lack of food for thought. Just lack of food for the poor disobedient customers of The Store.
Book cover review: 5/5 (I love peeking under dust jackets to see what, if anything, lies beneath. This half-jacket hybrid is unlike any I've seen before. So unique!)
0 comments:
Post a Comment