By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Ben Ryder Howe's family is so thoroughly New England�WASP, so set in its Puritan ways, he writes, "that after coming over on the Mayflower it spent the next ten generations stubbornly rooted in Plymouth, presumably so that it could get on the first boats back if people started returning."

  • Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli deftly mixes lowbrow with highbrow.

    Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli deftly mixes lowbrow with highbrow.

Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli deftly mixes lowbrow with highbrow.

But as a student at the University of Chicago (which, he proudly notes, was crowned by Maxim magazine as "the least fun school in the entire country"), he fell in love with a Korean immigrant, Gab Pak, whose parents worked in convenience stores.

They married and moved to New York, where Gab became a corporate lawyer and Ben an editor at the Paris Review, the highbrow literary magazine run by the legendary George Plimpton.

Howe's charming memoir, My Korean Deli, opens in 2002. Gab and Ben are in their early 30s, living with their in-laws in Staten Island, and saving for a place of their own.

But their lives take a U-turn. Gab decides to buy a deli, so that her mother, who doesn't know the meaning of retirement, can run it as a family business. It a daughter's way of repaying her mother's sacrifices.

"She was going to give her back her business," Howe writes. "And sacrifice her husband.

Misadventures ensue in a grubby deli in a semi-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Title: My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

Author:Ben Ryder Howe

Publisher/price: Henry Holt, 306 pp., $25

It's the kind of place, Howe confesses, where "the coffee is so bad it actually tastes better when combined with the tangy aftertaste of a Styrofoam cup."

Howe commutes between two worlds: literary editor by day, deli manager by night. Both are amateur, seat-of-the-pants enterprises.

The patrician, fun-loving Plimpton, who died in 2003, was a professional amateur. His most popular book, Paper Lion, chronicled his misadventures playing football with the Detroit Lions. (Alan Alda portrayed Plimpton in the 1968 movie.)

Howe comes to see that "in a funny way, the Paris Review is like a deli: it's a throwback, an institution that doesn't quite fit in the modern world. It's not big or corporate. It doesn't have a lot of swagger or muscle."

With much retail detail, the memoir bogs down a bit midway through. But despite his background, Howe resorts only occasionally to sentences like, "I also sometimes feel like a lab rat in some cosmic sociological experiment to judge the effect of precipitous class descent via a kind of Wittgensteinian wormhole of reverse immigration."

My Korean Deli is saved by Howe's self-effacing humor. He deals with real issues ? class, race and family ? in a light way.

He mentions two classic novels about shopkeepers, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, set in Brooklyn, and V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, set in an unnamed African country:

"Shopkeepers make good narrators because they're passive and steady, and they essentially want only small things, while the world keeps taking more from them than it gives back. Plus, in the end, something awful always happens to them."

Nothing awful happens to Howe's family. But he learns that amateurs can run a literary magazine; a deli is another matter.

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