Nasty Bits

Anthony Bourdain strikes me as the first guy in a long time to make it okay to be a writer. Sensuous, both shrewd and gullible, given to excesses, keeping a sense of humor, his prose embodies the curiosity of those who live and write from experience, telling it as they see it. He is an encouraging sign, helping take down the walls of ostracism erected to cordon off the freaks who see writing as essential to living.

Each time I pick up his latest, I am struck by the real power of his observations and comparisons. They reach far beyond the chef world he portrays, far beyond their argot. I find myself repeatedly with the sensation that I am reading the time-tested wisdom of an ancient. And in a way, I'm not surprised, given the elemental earthiness of the restaurant's professions.

Perhaps writing is compensation for living, doing a lot of things, many of them stupid, many of them huge mistakes, many of them the cause of hangovers and a need to take anti-inflammatory pills, a life as a form of blank tablet to receive wisdom gained through it all. Mr. Bourdain comes across to the reader as an honest fellow, even if he might slightly exaggerate a bit here and there.

Some people, going through traumatic times and times of growing up tend to take it out on other people, doing things that hurt and stymie the innocent. This is not the spirit of Mr. Bourdain, who brings us generosity out of the chef's life, leaving us with clarity and less confusion about who we are and where.

Somehow we still manage to hold on to a gallant ideal, that through all our work and time, that there is, as Sherwood Anderson says, a prince within, struggling against odds, and that at the end of it we will meet up with our princess, who also has been kept a kind of captive, and that we will live finally happy ever after. Reading a good book, that's how one feels.

Mr. Bourdain's world of food and kitchens and late night chef habits have struck a chord with readers satisfying perennial interest. But hidden beneath the surface the tale is as much of one surviving as a thinker, a writer, a poet, and all those other habits that don't immediately pay the bills. We're not too far away from Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. (There are, occasionally, reasons to take issue with authority, though of course there's a price to pay.) We're not too far away from the best book a writer will write, that one of how, maybe why, he or she became one. Mr. Bourdain shows us some of that courage.

Writers are, no doubt, deviants. Admittedly. Their work concerns itself with the processes of how people, maybe even they themselves, in a personal way, were made into deviants, pushed from the ranks of proper and polite society. Their work is to salvage the humanity within the wrecks of individual life, to hold on to the decent human being who once was and always will be. Perhaps their work shows the cruel inevitability of a small charge being transformed, through the law of its own movement, into a verdict, a judgment, a punishment. Bourdain lets the rest of see the deviance in the life of the professional kitchen, preserving its humanity as well.