Fiction Confidential

Henry Denard, the hero of Anthony Bourdain's second novel, Gone Bamboo, is a hit man with a heart of maybe 14-karat gold. He’s halfway botched a contract killing, and now must pay the price. He's holed up at the Oyster Pond Yacht Club in Saint Martin with his gorgeous, daring, gun-slingin' wife, Frances, as their mortal enemies begin to arrive on the island, one by one. It's a very violent mob novel, fair to middlin’ in quality, but with a lot of touching marital scenes between a sexy, outlaw version of Nick and Nora Charles.

When they got to the long section of loose dirt and gravel that curved around the high windward bluff over Baie Embouchure [sic], they were still laughing... Henry was driving too fast, and he felt Frances digging her knuckles into his ribs so he'd slow down. They sped around the ungraded turn, rear wheel sliding a little, past the sign marked only with an exclamation point. Still drunk from dinner and feeling mischievous, Henry ignored the knuckles in his side and opened up the throttle even more.

Bourdain doesn't often talk about his career as a writer; he tends to blab about his junkie past, his life as a cook, and his fantastic and sometimes dangerous travels. But somehow he has also managed to write 13 books, including the two celebrated memoirs, Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw. His books, like his television shows, give a superficial impression of extreme candor, but look a little closer and you will often see moments of restraint, of filial or marital or parental respect or politesse, a gentle drawing of the curtain over private moments. The mask seems to drop when Saint Martin is mentioned, though; the island turns up in a number of key places in his work — it’s evidently a touchstone, in fiction and in fact.

A New York Times profile promoting Gone Bamboo in advance of its publication in 1997 describes a nearly unrecognizable Anthony Bourdain: a chef who "hopes to write his way out of the kitchen." According to this account, he had been through a very rough patch in the eighties when “a visit to Saint Martin with his wife in 1988 turned him around." When he got home, he cleaned up his act, began taking his work seriously, and enrolled in a writing workshop at Columbia.

When Saint Martin reappears in the 2010 Medium Raw, it’s the dark place where Bourdain crashed in 2005 or 2006 after the crackup of that early marriage, to Nancy Putkoski, his high school sweetheart. He was in a terrible state — borderline suicidal — in the magical place where he'd once started his life over.

That's where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not very well lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers... were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was... I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs' edges approaching the French side. Here, I'd really step on the gas... depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I'd decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.

The relationship with Putkoski was one of some 30 years' duration, and it ended only a few years after he'd hit the big time and become a TV star. Given its importance, his account in the memoir is sparing with details. "I'd pretty much burned down my previous life," he writes. "I didn't own much. Some clothes. A few books. A lot of Southeast Asian bric-a-brac." And that's about all we learn about his marriage and divorce.

But an uncannily similar scene appears in his second novel, which was published many years before the divorce. Denard, the protagonist of Gone Bamboo, is modeled on Bourdain — "around six foot four, thin, and deeply tanned" — down to the gold hoop earring in his left ear, which you can see in the author’s jacket flap photo:

Leaving the Mariner's Club, he took the mountain route back to the pond, the scooter handling differently without Frances holding on in the rear... A few hundred yards ahead, the road took a steep drop down the other side of the mountain to the sea. The road was ungraded and unbanked; one could easily fly right off the side of that mountain, and Henry considered that option, toyed with the idea as if playing with himself, not serious, just to see how bad things were...

Bad manners to kill yourself. Realizing how drunk he really was, Henry started up the scooter and drove cautiously home.

It’s hard to imagine how or why such a scene could have appeared first in a novel, only to re-emerge years later post-dated as fact in a memoir, dressed just a little differently. And distressing, to think that this beloved figure has been picturing such a terrible moment for so long, for reasons we may never know. Though we'd been told explicitly in 1997 that the author was not in good shape on that first visit to Saint Martin in 1988, when he "turned himself around," is this what he drew on, for that frightening moment in Medium Raw? And isn’t it strange, how the fiction feels truer? “Just to see how bad things were…”

Describing a beautiful night he spent in the Moroccan desert, Bourdain once called himself "the luckiest son of a bitch in the world." That's the television persona talking, the Rabelaisian prince of sensuality and delight the whole world loves. But read the books and a far more complicated portrait emerges: that of a reflective and deeply self-critical man, a melancholic figure strikingly at odds with the debonair, self-assured TV star who is pretty much obligated to write about his experiences somewhat calculatingly, with a view to maintaining the brand — a burden he talks about quite openly sometimes. The "real" Bourdain isn't someone we're meant to know, maybe.

But you can find him, I think, in those early novels — Bone in the Throat (1995), Gone Bamboo (1997), and The Bobby Gold Stories (2001).

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Bourdain came of age in the mid-1970s, a time of no brakes at all, a moment of pure hedonism in America. "Decadence" meant the dark beauty and excitement of debauchery, rather than anything gnarly. (The gnarly part was coming up fast, but it was a ways off yet.) A keen reader even as a teen growing up in Leonia, New Jersey, he wolfed down Hunter S. Thompson, Orwell, Burroughs, Lester Bangs, and I bet Baudelaire and DeQuincey; listened to the Stooges, the Dolls, Roxy Music, the Velvets, and The Ramones. (He dedicated his 2006 essay collection, The Nasty Bits, "To Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee.")

The only culture worth knowing then was the counterculture. The Vietnam War began in 1956, the year of his birth, and ended the year he turned nineteen — surely now, in 1975, the reign of the liars and the squares had ended for good. Cocaine was routinely touted as a natural, plant-based high — health food, practically. ("It's made from leaves!") There was, as yet, no AIDS. Peak Free Love had arrived. That the young Bourdain literally "wanted to be a junkie" only meant that he was a little more committed than most to the prevailing atmosphere of pleasure and abandon. "I always wanted to be a criminal," he confesses blithely in the essay, "A Life of Crime." He once told an interviewer that he was expelled from Vassar as the result of a "depraved incident" involving angry lesbians and firearms.

This rebel son was raised in an ultra-civilized suburban family atmosphere. His mother, Gladys, was a New York Times editor, and her byline, G.S. Bourdain, appears over Times stories about Robbe-Grillet, opera stars, Cinecitta and the opening of Fauchon in Manhattan; her subjects and her writing both are suggestive of high standards, formality, propriety. Sam Sifton once described her as "a legendary editor... with a legendary temper." She was a good cook, too. Bourdain describes favorite childhood dishes now and then — his mother’s meatloaf, her crème renversée — though his memories of the crisply pressed shorts and matching socks he and his younger brother were made to wear as kids, boarding the Queen Mary for a vacation in France, are not so fond.

Gladys’s husband, Pierre Bourdain, born in Manhattan to a French mother in 1929, was a very different kettle of bouillabaisse. Of his father's omnivorous tastes, Bourdain wrote in Bon Appetit, "France had runny, pungent cheeses and sausages that were 'marvelous.' But the Jersey Shore, where we were more likely to vacation, had steamer clams, not to mention the occasional lobster with drawn butter [...] He taught me early that the value of a dish is the pleasure it brings you; where you are sitting when you eat it — and who you are eating it with — are what really matter. Perhaps the most important life lesson he passed on was: Don't be a snob."

Pierre Bourdain died of a heart attack in 1987, aged just 57; the Times obituary mentions his surviving sons, but not his marriage. The implied divorce, hidden in plain view, is not something his older son ever talked about, to my knowledge, either in interviews or in his books — not even in his novels. Here is a reminiscence of Pierre from Medium Raw:

Wanting a child is easy enough. I'd always — even in the bad old days — thought fondly of the times my father would carry me aloft on his shoulders into the waves off the Jersey Shore, saying, "Here comes a big one!" I'd remembered my own five-year-old squeals of terror and delight and thought I'd like to do that with a child someday, see that look on my own child's face.

The characters in Bone in the Throat are wise-guy caricatures, all very fancifully drawn, with plenty of cliches and "I'm sick a' his shit" and "I'm tellin' you he's a faggot" and mobsters being shot in the head and chopped into conveniently disposable pieces, etc. But here too is our hero, Tommy Pagano, recalling his own father, a mobster whose spirit had been broken in jail.

On those rare occasions when his father took him out of the city, to Coney, to the Jersey shore, he smiled again. He'd carry Tommy on his shoulders and charge into the surf, saying, "Watch out! here comes a big one," laughing when the waves knocked them off their feet.

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Bone in the Throat was a New York Times Notable Book in its year, 1995; it's a lively, quick read, appallingly violent, with a big helping of first-novel flaws: baggy exposition, flat, mostly undifferentiated secondary characters, and dialogue that Kirkus Reviews described as "flabby." The Cleveland Plain Dealer's David Farkas justly praised the passages concerned with food and cooking, but he found the rest of the book a little hackneyed ("Stock Ingredients Simmer in Authentic Chef's Plot").

There are fine things in it, though. My favorite parts of Bone in the Throat concern Tommy's boss, chef Michel Ricard, a heroin addict on his beam ends, trying to get clean.

The chef, the tallest one, was pale and thin, with long brown hair that curled out from under his chef's hat. He held a copy of Larousse Gastronomique and was turning the pages furiously... A cigarette dangled from his mouth. [...]

"And I'm telling you right now, both of you — I come in and find you or Ricky sneakin' cream [into the beurre blanc] again, you'll be peeling fuckin' shallots and bearding mussels for the next fuckin' month."

Soon Ricard is lunching with his refined, elegant mother, hitting her up for some coin.

"It's great," said the chef, shoveling an enormous mouthful into his face, crème Chantilly gathering at the corners of his mouth. "This was a great meal. Outstanding."

"And I suppose I'm paying for it," said his mother.

"Well," said the chef.

"And you said you needed money," said his mother, reaching into her purse. She handed him a check for a thousand dollars, written in her spidery, old-lady scrawl. "I'm only giving you this if you promise to get a haircut. You look like a cannibal like that." [...]

André, the chef and owner of the restaurant, came over to the table to pay his respects. He wore a spotless white chef's coat with Chinese buttons and the French tricolor adorning the collar... He spoke in French for a few moments with the chef's mother, inquiring about the meal and about her health... She turned to the chef and in English said, "André, allow me to present my son, Michel. He is a chef also."

The chef sat up in his chair and extended his hand. He wanted to die.

Shades of the mom who writes about Marguerite Duras in the Times. A later chapter finds Ricard begging to be accepted into a methadone program:

As each junkie reached the head of the line, the nurse put bright orange diskettes into a clear plastic cup, added hot water from a coffee urn, and handed it over. The person being medicated would add orange drink to the cup from the plastic pitchers on the counter and then stir the mixture with thin wooden stirrers. It was typically a swollen, puffy-fingered hand, covered with purple stripes and scar tissue, that would raise cup to mouth.

They drank greedily.

[...]

"I'm a desperate man, Mr. James," said the chef, half smiling, trying his best to be disarming. He looked for encouragement in Mr. James's eyes, saw only zeal, a faraway look, like that of a religious fanatic. "I want to get off dope. I don't want to find myself, in a few months or a year, slipping back into it... I want to stop having to look for dope every day."

[But Mr. James turns Ricard down for immediate treatment. He'll have to wait three weeks.]

"But what do I do till then?"

"I can't tell you what to do or not to do."

"I have to keep scoring on the street till then? I have to keep doing dope?"

"I'm not saying that."

"What should I do?"

"You should return here in three weeks."

Though I tend to think of Bourdain more as a superb raconteur than as a novelist, each of his novels is much better than the last. The violence, particularly in Gone Bamboo, the second of the three, is deliberately grotesque, in something like the manner of Mario Puzo, but the characterizations and dialogue deepen, and so does the romance, which reaches its peak in The Bobby Gold Stories. There's always a tough, beautiful lady; they are all smart, hard-drinking and damaged, like noir heroines, with a strong tendency to get their men into trouble.

I wound up concluding that these books are almost Harlequin novels for boys — fantasy-fulfillment, gaudily unreal. Or like a first-person shooter game: fun, if you can handle the butchery, the fragmentation grenades, the vaporizing heads, the punctured liver, spleen, and pancreas of the bad guy in Gone Bamboo going down in a hail of bullets, his "white T-shirt blossoming like a rosebush in a time-lapse nature study."

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Over time, the central tension or mainspring that develops in Bourdain's writing is an almost standard-issue artist's paradox; he is an aesthete with a bone-deep love of order and belonging — mise en place is a frequently recurring theme — balanced against an ineradicable streak of Dionysian frenzy. He's a romantic renegade, "mad, bad and dangerous to know," Seventies-flavor. Why should we "be good," when it's the world that sucks? When pretty much everything should be so much better than it is? There's a bedrock disappointment and sadness that undergirds all Bourdain's work in ways not immediately apparent when you think of the lucky-bastard, devil-may-care proposition that sells his books and television shows. He once told an Australian interviewer as much.

You know I am angry, clearly that fuels me. But I like to think like a lot of other authors I can think of, the flip side of that is a sense of spoiled romanticism, a disappointment with the way the world turned out. You know... it was supposed to be far more beautiful and romantic, and gentle, and I learned pretty early on, it wasn't gonna be like that.

Concealing an inner sadness. So obvious, right? Even if true, better by far not to care or to dwell on it, to be more concerned instead about the next delicious fruit or flesh to share with the world. Ultimately, to be too messy, too human, will put anyone at a professional disadvantage. You don't want to be too sincere, or too flawed, or you will rock the boat. Bourdain’s nonfiction, the brilliant television travelogues — these are the products of art, and they are also a business proposition based on making something of value to share with an audience. A sound strategy, given the circumstances, defensible both as business, and as a way of staying sane.

Unflinching self-knowledge — including the knowledge of his many past errors — hasn't altered Bourdain's predisposition to be violently opinionated about pretty much everything, from Donald Trump (not a fan) to the correct cheese to put on a burger (American). Still more admirably, he knows not only how to admit an error, but how to change course, how to improve.

As Bourdain matured into his role as a public figure, his persona grew glossy and sophisticated. His famous No Reservations dinner with Ferran Adrià, the increasingly glorious film work in Parts Unknown, his famous friendships with the titans of global cuisine — Eric Ripert, Fergus Henderson, and the rest. Still hitting the dives in the far-flung locales, drinking the local hooch with the natives, for flavor. Don't get me wrong, j'adore and all. Always have. The lushness and beauty, the respect for film history, the humor and openheartedness of Parts Unknown make it a marvel of modern cultural criticism. The luster of maturity suits Bourdain as well as the leather jacket and earring once did. But what I think I love most in Bourdain’s later work is the story, told over the course of many years, of his relationship with Emeril Lagasse.

In 2000, Bourdain expressed open contempt for the cooking of the "Ewok-like," "fuzzy little Emeril" in the pages of his breakout bestseller, Kitchen Confidential. The very next year, A Cook's Tour was published; suddenly Bourdain was managing a television career of his own. He mused over the compromises he'd already made, describing his new position with the old saw, "We've already established you're a whore. Now we're just haggling over price."

I sold my ass... When the shooter [cameraman] says, "Wait a minute," you wait to enter the restaurant, jump in the river, or light the cigarette, so he can get the shot [...]

I've had a lot of fun trashing Emeril and Bobby and the Food Network's stable of stars over the last few years. God, I hated their shows. Now, I've gone over to the dark side, too. Watching Emeril bellowing catchphrases at his wildly barking seal-like studio audience, I find myself feeling empathy for the guy... One sells one's soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it's a simple travel show ('Good for the book!') Next thing you know, you're getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel.

Colleagues like Norman Van Aken stood up for Emeril, too — told Bourdain that he was a nice guy, that he could really cook. By the time the "Updated Edition" of Kitchen Confidential came out in 2007, Bourdain had changed his mind some more.

Emeril Lagasse turned out to be not such a bad bastard after all... Emeril was actually a real chef once. A guy who, not unlike me, worked his way up the line, and who — unlike me — succeeded on his merits as a chef, cook and businessman... I hear from mutual friends that he's good in a bar fight — something that only raises him in my estimation.

Gradually he became friendly with Emeril, and the two found themselves co-hosts at the roast of a mutual friend, Mario Batali, as recounted in Medium Raw.

In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked, as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it... I asked him why he gave a fuck. "You've got a large, well-respected restaurant empire... the cookbooks... the cookware line" — which is actually pretty high-quality stuff — "presumably you've got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore — that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? If I was you... it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone... I'd be so far off the fucking grid, you'd never see me in shoes again... I'd live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—"

He didn't elaborate. He smiled tolerantly, then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick, broad — and slightly sad — strokes the sheer size of the Beast that had to be fed every day in order for him to be Responsible Emeril — and do right by all the people who'd helped him along the way and who now relied on him, in one form or another, for their living.

Bourdain wasn’t (and isn’t) a restaurateur with a huge company to run, but there’s a powerful tug of identification in this passage.

In 2012, Emeril appeared on David Simon's post-Katrina-themed HBO show, Treme. In a scene written by Bourdain, Emeril takes the up-and-coming chef, Janette Desautel, to Uglesich's, a legendary New Orleans lunch spot, now sadly shuttered; his advice to Desautel echoes what the real Emeril told Bourdain that long-ago night at the Batali roast.

You see, they made a choice. Anthony and Gail [Uglesich] made a choice to stay on Baronne Street, and keep their hands on what they were servin'. They cooked. Every day they cooked, until they could cook no more. But it was one choice.

And the other choice is what? Gettin' bigger? ...

Well, the other choice is that you can build something big and keep it the way that you want to keep it... You're the captain of the ship. Or what I should say, is that you're the ship. And all these people that look up to you, and want to be around you, they're livin' on the ship. And they're saying, oh, the ship is doin' good. Oh, the ship is going to some interesting places. Oh this ship isn't going down, just like all the fuckin' ships I been on. You got it?

Fuck me.

Yeah fuck you, chef. That's the way it is. You got a chance to do your restaurant and take care of these people. Just do it.

So is it worth it?

Eh.

Compared to something like this, something that's just cookin'?

Eh... some days, yes. Some days.... hey.

If you get what you want, the brass ring comes with things you couldn't have anticipated — things that might have changed your mind entirely, had you known what was coming. Here, as it seems he had years before as a novelist, Bourdain makes use of a fictional setting in order to lay down his own demons, and also to settle his conscience.

I'd had unfinished business with Emeril... I made much of my career early on making fun of Emeril. He was a person who I didn't understand at all, as a working line cook: this guy who liked people [this phrase delivered in tones of disbelief] and who normal people liked, and lived in a brightly-lit studio. I had no understanding of that, or any of those forces... I've come to understand. So it had long been my ambition... I've come to know him, Emeril, a little bit. And I wanted to get Emeril to say the word "fuck" on television. It was very important to me. I wanted to portray Emeril as the guy whom I know to be — a guy with a lot of responsibilities, responsible for a lot of people, and a big empire, and the weight of time bearing down on him, so I wrote this scene for Emeril — and he killed it! I mean... very satisfying to me.

In considering Bourdain's career, "reality TV," that deranged oxymoron that has brought American culture so much grief, comes to mind. What is this amalgam of art, commerce, biography, sharing, artifice, and affectation? Playing a rebel on TV seems... weird? And yet one comes away with a sensation that the author is, at bottom, honest about who he is, despite all the inescapable show-biz poses. Here’s one reader’s guess, educated by means of his strange, multifarious 13-volume autobiography: The real Anthony Bourdain is his mother’s son, who loves everything that is comme il faut. Also his father’s son, who knows that comme il faut is a complex matter, but most of all it is open and omnivorous, respectful of all people, curious, craftsmanlike, truth-loving. “Don’t be a snob.” Deepest of all there are old, secret scars of self-recrimination, and a host of mixed-up feelings about the role he is playing now, in his gilded, globetrotting cage.

Read all his books like I did and you will come to know Bourdain the star pretty well, but the man behind the curtain may seem more professionally remote than ever — except when you consider his fiction. Especially those rare, wild things he wrote before he needed, maybe, to insulate himself from the hard and disappointing world.

If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. For international resources, here is a good place to begin.

Maria Bustillos is a writer and critic living in Los Angeles.
Jessica Garcia is an illustrator based in South Florida.
Edited by Matt Buchanan
Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter

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California Dreaming, by Marian Bull
Did Someone Order a Pizza?, by EJ Dickson
How to Run a Restaurant in a Refugee Camp, by Sandra Zhao and Roopa Gogineni