Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Starred review from June 5, 2017
Shopsin (Mumbai New York Scranton) weaves a marvelous patchwork quilt of stories about a Manhattan that doesn't exist anymoreâthat of 1970s Greenwich Village, where her father opened Shopsin's General Store. Her narrative reads like prose poetry with the rhythm of a jazz song: much of each page is left blank, as if to emphasize the words she doesn't use; the arrangement of her spare, blunt paragraphs conjures vivid pictures throughout ("Channeling photos of old New York with clotheslines strung from every building, I ran one on a hypotenuse from my fire escape to my farthest window"). Shopsin's narrative is decidedly nonlinear: she bounces among stories of her father's best friend Willoughby; working in her parents' store-cum-restaurant; taking trips with her partner, Jason; and the diverse characters from the neighborhood. Shopsin, who now cooks at the restaurant, doesn't shy away from her city's lows, such as the high crime rate at the time, explaining that her father's store got broken into nearly every week. The seemingly disparate tales come together into an artistic ode to a way of life that people now living in New York City might never experience.

May 15, 2017
Candid recollections of growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1980s.Graphic designer, illustrator, and memoirist Shopsin (Mumbai New York Scranton, 2013, etc.) continues her life story in a chronicle constructed of terse paragraphs, whimsical graphics, and family photographs. The author, her twin sister, and three brothers ranged freely in the neighborhood around Morton Street, where her parents--her irascible father, Kenny, a cook, and gentle mother, Eve--owned The Store, a grocery, later turned into a restaurant that attracted celebrities such as John Belushi, Calvin Trillin (he paid in cookbooks), poet Joseph Brodsky, John F. Kennedy Jr., handsome in Lycra bike shorts, and a host of models, rock stars, and athletes. Good customers got a set of keys so they could go to the store any time it was closed, write down what they took, and pay later. Born in 1979, the year the schoolboy Etan Patz disappeared, Shopsin was hardly overprotected. "The city may have been more dangerous," she writes, "but it was a less hostile place. Everyone knew each other." Still, she witnessed blacks beaten up by a gang of boys, drug addicts sleeping in doorways, and homeless people living in playgrounds. "It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos," she writes. "It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred." The author succeeds admirably in expressing that spirit, largely through sharp, loving portraits of two brash, irreverent, opinionated men: her father, who summarily banned certain customers from his restaurant, and his best friend Willy, superintendent of an apartment building, occasional nightclub singer, flagrant womanizer, and scam artist. Shopsin adored them both. It was her father who came up with the phrase "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" to describe his "guiding belief": "A goal that isn't too important makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force" that allows you "to find ecstasy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday." A warm evocation of a quirky life and exuberant times.

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June 1, 2017
Deeply nostalgic but not at all mawkish, Shopsin's supremely charming and affecting memoir of growing up in a pre-gentrified Greenwich Village will enchant fans of restaurant lore and postwar New York history alike. In short, impressionistic chapters illustrated with photos, ephemera, and Shopsin's own adorably insouciant line drawings, the book conjures a vanished bohemia without any hint of the irritating pedantry that dogs so many of its kind. Shopsin's parentsfamiliar to fans of the writer Calvin Trillin and those who've seen the documentary I Like Killing Fliesopened Shopsin's General Store in 1973 and turned it into a restaurant shortly thereafter, one beloved by local weirdos, celebrities, models, artists, and everyone in between. Shopsin, who still works there sometimes, recalls her unconventional childhood and those who shaped it with considerable warmth; she pays special attention to her dad's late friend, Willy, an outsize personality whom Shopsin cares for in his dotage. Gumball machines, meat slicers, Nazi bunkers, and pancake methodologies all make cameo appearances, much to the reader's delight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)