"Arbitrary Stupid Goal" by Tamara Shopsin

The book’s title turns out to be the mantra of the author’s father, Ken Shopsin, who died in 2018, the year after Tamara published it. Ken Shopsin and his wife, Eve, ran a restaurant in the West Village called “The Store” which was indeed first a general store—you might call it a bodega now—that had a grill and a deli case. Sometime around the 1980s it evolved into a diner-style restaurant after the rent got so high that the Shopsins couldn’t afford to keep it up unless they sold more expensive meals.

Much of Tamara Shopsin’s narrative takes place in the kitchen, where she worked as a cook (and still does, though The Store has moved to the Lower East Side in one of those big underground corporate marketplaces). That relocation though does not earn much elaboration in the memoir, which is definitely about the West Village in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. What Shopsin does elaborate are the perhaps much more interesting stories about her family/coworkers, her neighbors on Morton Street, and the customers. Most of the book takes place when Shopsin was growing up, but also there’s a lot that precedes the author’s life—tales of how The Store started off, how her parents made do in those early years, how they met, whom they befriended. The book is a vivid time capsule offering up a prior incarnation of NYC, before cell phones, before luxury condos (at least in the West Village), before the virtual extinction of places like the Shopsins’ restaurant.

The story meanders seemingly without much organization; Shopsin often tricks you into thinking a story has reached a dead end, only to revive it a chapter or two later, randomly (or not). As I read I wondered if the memoir’s unconventional structure was an enactment of the arbitrariness that Shopsin has taken to heart. As if to show by example that all attempts at order and logical sequencing in life are foolish, or something. Actually, Shopsin reveals at the end of the memoir that “arbitrary stupid goal” is not about abandoning a sense of order but constructing it when it seems to be absent. ASG is her father’s way of keeping life interesting when there doesn’t seem to be a point to it at all. Through Tamara’s storytelling, the Shopsins are inviting us to make up a quest, whether or not it is socially valuable or advisable, and then pursue it. Because why not?

One could read my synthesis of this philosophy as a kind of inane and privileged way of going about one’s life. But I don’t think Shopsin is asking us to organize our whole lives this way. (If she was, she probably wouldn’t have spent so long toiling behind her parents’ grill.) Rather, she is reminding us to do things for the company or the process sometimes—the outcome is less important. And because many of our society’s supposedly desirable outcomes are terribly empty anyway, in the end.