What a Piece of Work is the Hamlet Sloppy Joe!

To BLT or not to BLT: that is the question of the moment.  And whether ‘tis nobler or not, our deli-cately mannered KMJ apparently doesn’t mind suffering the verbal slings and visual arrows of outraged fellow patrons at the crowded Hickory Tree Delicatessen on this early springtime day.  She can’t decide what to order, and it’s creating a bit of a tragicomic tableau.  

She’s placing too much emphasis on the lunch order, we murmur.  She’s stressing over Genoa salami, tormenting herself—and everyone in this establishment—over whether or not to add avocado to her sandwich, we hiss, sotto voce.  KMJ presses her perspiring palms and panic-stricken face against the cold, curved glass of the deli case, surveying Olive Loaf and assessing Chipotle Gouda. We, in turn, scan the assemblage of lunchtime consumers and espy excellent reader and sandwich connoisseur ST elbowing her way through the restive throng, waving a hardcover novel in the air.

The Darlings: A Novel by Cristina Alger.

Viking, 2012.  338 pages.

Fiction Favorites

How infinite in faculty is ST, presenting us with this flippant page-flipper about a prosperous Big Apple family embroiled in financial funny-business. Manhattan attorney Paul Ross, comfortable in custom-made suits and habituated to weekends in the Hamptons, is married to Merrill Darling, fair and dutiful daughter of billionaire investment manager Carter Darling.  When Paul loses his job during the Recent Financial Downturn, pressure to maintain a comfortable, habitual Manhattan lifestyle propels him toward the family-in-law business. Too proud to tighten his Gucci belt, too complacent to consider a retreat to suburbia, Paul signs on as general counsel at Delphic, the Darling’s practically-too-big-to-fail hedge fund.

Our complacently-belted protagonist, it turns out, is the kind of guy who understands the importance of the small decisions, those tender tipping points as inconsequential as what sandwich you ordered for lunch (your boss ordered the same one; you spoke of it; later, he became your mentor)....  This bit of news delights KMJ, who returns to her deli-berations with renewed sense of purpose.  Roast Beef with Horseradish-flavored Cheddar?  Ovengold Turkey topped with Baby Swiss?  This sandwich could spell a date with vocational destiny!  

Ophelia by John Everett Millais, circa 1852

Speaking of dates with vocational destiny, two months into Paul’s employment, Divine Providence launches Delphic and the Darling clan into the twenty-first century media limelight and onto the front pages of the tabloids.  One of Carter’s chummiest business associates takes a madcap tumble from the Tappan Zee Bridge. Like poor Ophelia, Morty Reis meets a muddy death... drown’d, drown’d, suspiciously drown’d!  Something is rotten in the state of Delphic, and it reeks of Ponzi, with a whiff of Madoff.   

The feds are closing in.  Pesky investigators threaten the family business.  Swift as quicksilver, Paul must answer for millions of investor dollars that have vanished from the fund and decide where his loyalties lie.  Will he save himself from scandal beyond all the noble substance of a doubt?  Will he betray his fair and dutiful wife, protect the family business, preserve his comfortable and habitual Manhattan lifestyle?  And, more to the point, will KMJ decide what to order and get this line moving? The ill-fed are closing in!  They're making threatening gestures!

We inquire what ST will be ordering after the Current Sandwich Crisis is resolved.  With a countenance lined more in sorrow than in anger, she gazes wistfully at the commercial grade meat slicer behind the counter and declares: Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun—or this stinkin’ line—doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love... the Cajun Turkey and Asiago Cheese with Lettuce and Tomato on a Whole Wheat Wrap, and if I ever get to the front of the line, that’s what it’s going to be.

Alas, Poor Yorick

Ahem.  We turn to discover a heavy-set, ruddy-faced gentleman sporting a battered New York Yankees baseball hat.  He appears to be a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy: a Yankees fan who, in a different time and place, would be given to all manner of gibing and gamboling, to singing and flashes of merriment.  Today, though, he appears all manner of hungry and more than mildly agitated.  Thinking of Hamlet’s permanently ill-fed and indisposed court jester, we dub the deli interloper Poor New York-ick.   

Your dazzling colloquy about The Darlings, he growls, puts me in the mind of an earlier and brilliant evocation of the quintessential American city’s socio-political milieu in the late-twentieth century....

The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel by Tom Wolfe.

Picador, 1987.  685 pages.

Fiction Favorites

How noble in reason, we exclaim, exchanging nervous glances and tugging on KMJ’s sleeve.  Remember Sherman McCoy—the arrogant, infantile Master of the Universe with a Waspy wardrobe, a social X-ray wife, a commodious Park Avenue apartment?  Remember the mistress, the Mercedes, the wrong turn in the South Bronx, the panic, the squealing tires, the skinny young black man, pure fear on his delicate face, the ominous thok! and the subsequent cavalcade of deli-ghtfully conflicted characters: society types, investment bankers, law enforcement, legal representation, activist clergy, avaricious politicians, tabloid journalists, miscellaneous street-savvy hustlers?  

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a raucous urban romp, an audacious exploration of carnal appetites and savage ambitions, casting the modern city as an iron-clad melting pot of ethnicity, teeming humanity and social degradation, twisted justice and political depravity.

Melting? KMJ pauses, dreaming perchance of a toasted sandwich.

Indicted Ham Sandwich

One of the most encouraging things about this book, Poor New York-ick offers, is that the characters—regardless of social status and political persuasion—keep the line moving, actually ordering and consuming deli sandwiches.  In the South Bronx, they sit hunched over their deli sandwiches until the day they retire or die.  And on Wall Street, they sit... by the telephone and order in from the deli like the rest of the squadron.
  
There are great menu suggestions here, too, he continues.  On page 132, we have a roast beef sandwich on an onion roll with mustard... and a pepperoni hero with everything you could throw into it thrown in.  And then on page 624, we have a grand jury that would indict a ham sandwich.  Does that help at all?  KMJ eyes him skeptically before returning her rapt attention to a wrapped slab of Boar’s Head Smoked Turkey.  

Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike.

Knopf, 2002.  212 pages.

Fiction Favorites

Alas, Poor New York-ick, we knew the lady would not budge.   Daunted but not defeated, we direct our conversation toward an imaginative recreation of life and love at Elsinore before the rising action of Hamlet. It’s a deli-cious costume drama, piled high with poetic pretense and lovely language.  We witness young and restless Gertrude united in marriage with a prominent-yet-somehow-unlovable warrior prince.  In time, the prominent-yet-somehow-unlovable warrior prince becomes an equally prominent king and Gertrude, his restless, somehow unloving queen.  Their son grows into the brooding, enigmatically sneering deli-quent adult child we know as Prince Hamlet.  The Queen enters into an illicit relationship with her lustful, avaricious brother-in-law Claudius.  What follows, of course, is nasty family business and the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy: Claudius murders his brother, marries Gertrude, and orders Hamlet home from the idyll of German academia.

We remind KMJ that Updike’s acquiescent players feast upon cold cuts of ham injected with brine, morsels of goose preserved in honey, salt herring and cod cut in strips for dainty handling.  Moving beyond the abject medievality of these offerings, BJM postulates, one might reasonably hope to find palatable selections in a modern North Jersey delicatessen.  But nay, the dry-erase menu board delights not KMJ.

Taking Issue with Funeral Baked Meats

Ever the brooding, enigmatically sneering deli-quent adult child, Hamlet wrangles with his mother’s o’erhasty marriage to her late husband’s murderous brother, taking issue with funeral baked meats that coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.  Listening intently, KMJ scans the dry-erase menu board for some mention of funeral baked meats.  No such luck.  As we marvel at the narrative repercussions of the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius, a portentous wedding that took place in the white depths of winter, we recall another brooding, enigmatically sneering deli-quent adult child and a comparably portentous White Wedding.  Sing it, circa-1982 Billy Idol:

Seating Arrangements: A Novel by Maggie Shipstead.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.  301 pages.

What Were We Thinking?

We were thinking, of course, about the narrative repercussions of White Weddings.  And we won’t find a whiter wedding than the one in this low-calorie dessert of a debut novel, a comedy of Anglo-manners that prompts us to ponder whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love in contemporary White America.  Master of His WASP Universe Winn Van Meter travels to the family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke for the ironically white wedding of pregnant daughter Daphne to Greyson Duff, an infinitely white fellow of jest and excellent fancy. 

On wedding weekend, we bear witness to a waspish display of behavior and misbehavior, convoluted and socially incestuous relationships exemplified by the biographical profile of Ophelia Haviland.  Fee Haviland Fenn is not only Winn’s ex-girlfriend and wife of long-time rival Jack Fenn, but also mother of Winn’s daughter Lydia’s scoundrel ex-boyfriend, Teddy Fenn!  Follow? O... that incestuous, that adulterate beast.  Winn’s wife Biddy has choreographed the nuptials with patience and precision; however, the weekend evolves or devolves, depending upon life perspective and literary proclivity, into a breezy examination of commitment and connection—a clash between love in honorable fashion and promiscuity of loyalties and affections.  In any case, it seems that they could use an extra virgin or two on the New England Island of Waskeke.  And speaking of extra virgin, KMJ is now contemplating the Hickory Panini: two slices Prosciutto, Fresh Mozzarella, Tomato and Arugula with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach.

Doubleday, 2012.  281 pages.

Non Fiction and Biographies

When Prince Hamlet declared, Frailty, thy name is woman, he was not making reference to Crusty Quaker Mistress of the Gilded Age Henrietta Howland Robinson Green.  Hetty was a feisty investor and chronologically anomalous female financier; at the time of her death in 1916, the so-called Witch of Wall Street was worth no less than one hundred million dollars.  Let's call it two-and-a-half billion dollars in contemporary currency, and let's stipulate that there was ample sandwich consumption in Hetty's Gilded Age New York City.  Even as J. P. Morgan reputedly took a sandwich and a glass of water at his desk during the Wall Street lunch hour, upper-crust females nibbled cucumber sandwiches for lunch, sampling dainty crustless sandwiches from gold-crusted plates in gold-plated rooms.

Don't Hold the Onions: Hetty Green

A woman of peculiar culinary taste and crusty pecuniary interest, Hetty was known to sally about the city with food secreted on her person: sometimes at noon, she ate a bowl of oatmeal or stole a sandwich out of her pocket.  In 1867, sandwich-pocketing Hetty and her fiscally capricious husband packed their trunks, ferried to Jersey City, and boarded the steamship Russia, where stewards in blued uniforms served them generous portions of baked ham, mutton chops, broiled salmon, smoked salmon, cold tongue in shipboard dining room.  

Please, No Mutton

You’re not going to find much in the way of Gilded Age mutton chops or cold tongue here at the deli, reasons BJM, but how about salmon?  You could go with a salad: Grilled Salmon over Spinach with Red Onion and Grape Tomatoes, splashed with a Lemon and Apple Cider Vinaigrette.  I’m not wild about onions, sniffs KMJ.  You do recall Hetty Green’s enthusiastic endorsement of allium cepa, admonishes BJM.  She chewed them daily, declaring them the finest thing in the world for health.

Angry: J.P. Morgan

An angry voice emanates from the crowd: Forget Frailty!  Fickle, thy name is crazy-woman-in-the-down-vest-who’s- holding-up-the-line!  Will you order already?  In what can only be construed as a stroke of celestially-inspired misapprehension, KMJ whirls around and exclaims, Pickle!  Did someone say pickle?  What, ho!  We think of emotionally starved young Hetty, following her father to lunch at the Central Union Co-op.  How she listened to her father trade stories with the good old boys of New Bedford, Massachusetts. How, with little regard for her clothes, she plunked herself on one of the wooden barrels and munched on pickles and chunks of yellow cheese. 

What a Piece of Work: The Ham Sloppy Joe

Pickles and cheese.  Pickles and cheese.  Swift as quicksilver, KMJ settles on a kosher dill pickle and a single portion of limp Havarti cheese.  We hastily order Ham and Swiss on Rye, slathered with Russian Dressing and Cole Slaw.  Let's call it the Hamlet Sloppy Joe, a North Jersey deli favorite, wrapped in butcher’s paper and proffered with plenty of napkins. As we gather our purchases and prepare to depart stage right, we recall a snarky exchange between Hamlet, the brooding, enigmatically sneering deli-quent young adult of Denmark and his mother in Act I, Scene 2:  

Seems, madam!  Nay, it is.  Turns out, we know not seems.  While it seems that KMJ will consume a kosher dill pickle and limp Havarti for lunch, her expressly moving form and her admirable expression give us pause.  The lady doth protest very little, and now wethinks that the single slice of cheese will be employed instead as a semi-soft Danish cow’s milk bookmark.  Good Night, Sweet Prince and Exeunt with alacrity.  An exasperated horde of deli patrons gives chase!