Given the tenderness Garner lavishes on shelf-stable powdered cheese, it is no surprise that he was a chubby boy. His descriptions of his body constitute some of the sweetest and funniest passages in the book. “I was a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint, ‘husky’ in the department-store lingo,” Garner writes. “If I’d been a cat, my undercarriage would have swayed while I walked. … Everyone else was thin and tall, like bottles of German wine.” (Well, not quite everyone, buddy.)
Garner’s early appetite for everything from Bugles to blue crabs was matched by his equally wide-ranging appetite for literature, encompassing Miami Herald sports columns, scavenged copies of Oui magazine and the novels of Robert B. Parker. He tells of returning from school, fixing a sandwich “sodden with mayonnaise, cheese slices poking out like a stealth bomber’s wings,” and settling in under the ceiling fan for three or four hours of bliss. He would eradicate all traces of his activities by the time his father, who “would have preferred to see his son outside in shoulder pads,” came home.
What’s refreshing here is that Garner never problematizes his eating and reading habits; they were and remain the engine of his vitality. Pretzels and Calvin Trillin books didn’t serve as a numbing mechanism or an escape from life; they were an extension and intensification of life. He was, as he puts it, an “omni-directionally hungry human being” and he read not to escape — or to please English teachers — but to mainline illuminating data about the glittering world and glean clues on how to be a person in it.
“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,” Garner writes. The lessons he learned were largely lessons in cultivating gusto. His heroes are “people who liked to tuck into life,” such as the rumbustious characters in the novels of Jim Harrison, zesty and unpretentious, who relish “game birds and truffles but are just as happy to find a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli.” Garner himself likes to tuck into life, but he comes across as a relatable and domesticated carouser, a bon vivant who regularly goes on diets and appears happiest at home with his family, a stack of cookbooks, his 900-song Sonos playlist and a Gordon’s gin martini.
Books serve many purposes and one of the purposes they’ve served in Garner’s life is as goodie bags. It is our good fortune that he likes to share. This book is packed with anecdotes and quotations from his decades of reading, but it also abounds in actionable recommendations and opinions that — if you are a suggestible reader — will occupy you for months.
