So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  Still, my job requires me to eat out a lot, and when I do, it’s usually in exactly the kind of restaurants Bourdain talks about in his book. In fact, as I read along, I realized I’m probably exactly the kind of diner Bourdain hates. I’ve been a sauce-on-the-sider and have, depending on the diet I’m on that week, ordered the “vegetarian plate.” I often choose the plain fish entrée, no matter what the day of the week, and Bourdain says you should never order it on Monday, because it has probably been sitting around all weekend. Other things I often do that I’m not supposed to, says Bourdain: order meat well-done (the cook saves all the worst parts of the beef for this very occasion) and eat brunch ever. (Cooks throw any old scraps together for those “special” meals.)

  So I’m clearly not Bourdain’s ideal diner. Nor would I seem to be his ideal reader. But last week I was between books, as they say, and in desperate need of something to cleanse my palate after the rather hearty meal that was The House of Mirth. There in my local bookstore stood Bourdain—or at least his photographic equivalent—decked out in chef’s whites, holding the characteristic cigarette, and glaring at the camera. Now, that’s my kind of guy, I thought, even before I realized he was that guy, the hard-drinking, tough-talking, chain-smoking chef who’d spilled the beans on the restaurant biz and was now something of a national celebrity. To me he looked a lot like a guy I’d dated in the eighties.

  Hmmm. Maybe I didn’t want to be Bourdain so much as I wanted to be with him. For better or worse, I’d always been drawn to men who had, as a friend of mine once said, “something mean around the mouth.”

  I knew, going in, that Bourdain’s attitude toward food was obviously going to be very different from mine, but I could also tell, right off, that he had the kind of rough irreverence that’s as delicious—and forbidden—as hollandaise sauce. Here’s how Kitchen Confidential starts: “My first indication that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one’s face when hungry—like filling up at a gas station—came after fourth grade in elementary school.” Something about that “substance one stuffed in one’s face” and the allusion to a grubby gas station indicated that more aggressively down-and-dirty revelations were to come. How could I do anything but crawl into bed on that rainy afternoon and start to read?

  A few hours later, Charley came home from school and Leo called from the office. What do you want to do about dinner? my husband asked. “I don’t care as long as we don’t eat out,” I told him.

  I’m clearly not the only person enthralled with Kitchen Confidential; the book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And I’d bet I’m not the only woman drawn to Bourdain himself, who portrays himself as the ultimate bad boy who delights in playing the cowboy. He’s fearless: he names a lot of names (of restaurants, if not always of the people who owned or worked in them), and when he must resort to pseudonyms—I’d bet on his lawyer’s, not his own, suggestion—he uses amusing, colorful ones like Big Foot and Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown. He’s funny when he tells stories that make his friends and himself look silly or bad—I’m thinking of the interview he had with the steak-house owner who Bourdain thought asked him, “What do you know about me?” when in fact, he was posing a much more innocent, and ultimately relevant, question. And he never, ever apologizes. Like every rough-hewn bad boy every well-bred woman ever loved, he comes off as an affectionate outlaw, a college-educated punk who is just a little tiny bit too cool for cooking school.

  In her guide to writing The Forest for the Trees, the editor-turned-agent Betsy Lerner says that a memoirist fails the minute he or she compromises a single adjective in an effort to protect someone else’s feelings. I don’t know if somebody said that to Bourdain, or if he instinctively knew it, but it’s clearly a dictum he lives by. I’m sure there are a lot of people whose feelings he hurt in Kitchen Confidential, and there are surely people turned off by his arrogance and vulgarity, but I’m equally sure his response would be, “Well, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” His mission here was to tell the truth—his truth, maybe, but that counts. And the book works because he’s a bona fide hyped-up, foulmouthed raconteur—and plenty proud of it.

  In fact, if there’s a flaw in Kitchen Confidential, it’s that at times Bourdain seems too proud of his swashbuckling ways. I have to confess that I started to like him a little less as time went on and he drank, smoked, and caroused his way through another year. (And I couldn’t help thinking how his long-suffering wife must have felt while he did it, and then when he told the world about it.) After a while, too, his tales of kitchen debauchery started to feel more truish than true. Did one of Bourdain’s cook friends really lock eyes with a bride mid-reception and take her outside to go at it against a dumpster, while all his cronies looked on? I’d begun to have doubts.

  In other words, after a while, Anthony Bourdain—or at least the persona he’d constructed in these pages—started to annoy me, in much the way that that old boyfriend ultimately did. He started to seem just a little too macho and a little too tough. He had a sharp answer or a quick judgment for everything and I wanted him to calm down and stop acting like the very poseurs he so gleefully exposes in the book. Like a woman who has finally had her fill of bad-guy cowboys, I wanted to be with someone gentle and calm and just a little bit more real.

  So I guess I don’t want to be with Anthony Bourdain after all, and I know I don’t want to be like him. But I still appreciate his book, and not only because I now know to order plain chicken on Mondays. I appreciate Kitchen Confidential more because I found it instructive: it reminded me that most books—but memoirs in particular—are all about the voice, and that you can’t worry what other people are going to think about you if you tell your version of the truth. His subject is food and mine is books, but the same principles apply: you have to treat your subject with fearlessness and attitude and energy. Whether your industry’s sacred cows are beef or, say, novels that are just said to be “well-done,” you have to skewer them.

  Who knew a cook would teach me how to write?

  August 20 Anna, Emma, and Me

  One of the good things about having a partner who is just a tiny bit oblivious to the links between reading and life is that he doesn’t take particular note that the two books you’ve brought on your three-week family vacation are Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.

  In my imagination—the one where my life is a sitcom—Leo would notice me piling the two classics about adultery on the bedside table in our new rented master bedroom on Fire Island and would turn into Paul Reiser or Will from Will & Grace or somebody and ask, “Hey, what’s with the books about cheating? You tryin’ to tell me something?” And I’d say, “No, of course not, honey,” but then the twenty-seven-minute plot would reveal that, well, he didn’t believe me and was in fact running around misreading all sorts of innocent remarks and behaviors and had worked himself into a good righteous frenzy before his folly was revealed in some meet-cute way. Then we’d make up and live happily ever after.

  In case you (like me) somehow got through college without reading either novel, Anna Karenina is a long, most people think brilliant, nineteenth-century book about an upper-class Russian woman and mother who is married to a good though boring guy when she meets, on a train, the love of her life, the dashing Count Vronsky. Overpowered by a love she tries but fails to resist, she blows up her life and family to be with her beloved, only to become disillusioned and depressed and to throw herself under the wheels of another train. (Actually, the book is about a lot more than that, I discovered: it’s about politics and custom and agriculture, and there are a number of subplots, but, let’s face it, it’s the romance that most people read it for.) For all its surface similarities—Emma Bovary is an unhappy wife who resorts to adultery and ends up like Anna, a suicide—Flaubert’s classic is a little different: his Emma is not nobly tortured by her infidelities so much as not satisfied by them. She’s a woman of appetites that can never be sated. She is, as I told my friend Louisa, like Bill Clinton in
a nineteenth-century French dress.

  One of my most dearly held beliefs is that anybody who’s been married more than a couple of years who says she’s never considered adultery is either (a) a saint or (b) a liar or (c) both. People who say they’ve never had a crush—unrequited, maybe, but in any case not acted upon—are possibly insane on top of it. But if I had any doubts that timing plays a major role in how you feel about a book, this past month put those doubts to rest. As a younger unmarried woman, and at a less settled time in my marriage, I would have wept over Anna’s frustration and identified with Emma’s covetousness. I would not have spent two minutes thinking about Kitty and Levin, the two characters in Anna Karenina whose relationship is in direct opposition—it’s careful and slow and cerebral—to Anna and Vronsky’s. But these days I read both books the way I sometimes watch horror movies late at night on cable. I get agitated when the hero or heroine starts walking into the house that everybody else has known for hours is haunted. “Don’t go there!” I want to shout to Anna and Emma. “This way lies madness. And death.”

  It’s not that I don’t know temptation or sympathize with it. A male friend of mine was so lovesick last year for a woman who was not his wife—and with whom, he swears, nothing ever “happened”—that when I found him in tears on September 11, I panicked. Had his wife or kids been at or near the World Trade Center, I asked, nervously, over the phone. No, no, no, he told me, everybody was “fine.” It was just that the woman he loved from afar, with whom he was supposed to have lunch that day, was stranded in another city and wouldn’t be able to get back for their rendezvous. He was admitting this to me, he said, because he knew I wouldn’t “judge” him.

  When the whole Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky mess exploded, I remember telling a friend that I thought Bill just “couldn’t help it.” “Oh, he can help it all right,” my friend replied sourly. “He just doesn’t want to.”

  As for myself, here’s a story: Once upon a time, I met a man, let’s call him V., who was everything I thought I’d always wanted: he was charming, he was beautiful, he was wild and impetuous and crazy, mostly about me. Like Anna for a while, I resisted, though given that this was the late twentieth century and not the nineteenth, I was able to manufacture enough socially acceptable situations in which I could test that resistance. To say I was lovesick is a grand understatement; it was as if I had a terminal illness. You know how bodice-rippers always say things like “Every waking hour was consumed by thoughts of . . . him”? Well, every waking hour was consumed by thoughts of him. In fact, thinking back, I can’t remember how I managed to keep myself dressed and fed, and away from those open cellar-door things Leo would come along later to scream at me about.

  To give you some idea of just how far gone I was, let me tell you this: I didn’t read a thing. For months. I couldn’t concentrate. And when I did get dragged out—usually by a well-meaning friend to a movie or a play or a dinner—I was incredibly preoccupied. I remember going with my friend Judy to some Woody Allen movie that was supposed to be a comedy, except I came out of it in tears. “What’s up with you?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I lied. “It just seemed so sad. All these people who are in love with the wrong people and not being able to get the ‘right’ people to love them back,” I finally told her. “It’s as if he were writing this movie about me.” Being a good friend—and, I think, mightily concerned for my mental health—Judy didn’t mention that it was perhaps possible that Woody Allen, who would eventually leave Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter Soon Yi, was merely, as usual, writing about himself.

  In Tolstoy’s world, there are two kinds of relationships: those based on passion and longing like Anna and Vronsky’s, and those that exist on more rational, practical terms, like the union struck by Levin and Kitty. In our world, the same is true, except that since we can wait a lot longer to marry and can have plenty of adventures first, it’s generally expected that a young woman can get her Vronsky period over with, say, in her early twenties, and then be free to make a “smart” marriage a bit later on. But me, I couldn’t seem to get enough of Vronsky-like characters, much to my parents’ and even my friends’ chagrin. “He’s so exciting,” I’d say about this or that Vronsky of the moment. “He’s so interesting.” That whoever-he-was was almost always also extremely difficult—and that whatever relationship we were able to forge was thus extremely explosive—went without saying.

  And then I met Leo, who seemed right from the start a perfect blend of the two extremes. On the one hand, he was so different from anybody else I’d known that the whole idea of the relationship was dramatic; that he also has a wildly passionate artistic temperament made him all the more appealing to a woman with a jones for Vronskys. But he was also a seasoned adult, a grown-up, who’d already been married and was insistent that this time around he was going to do it right. As you know, we met in a bar, courtesy of his brother Jim and lots of advance publicity. What you don’t know yet is that it was love—or at least attraction—at first sight. Although today he’ll tell you that he thought I was “odd” because I was wearing ropes and ropes of fake pearls and a paisley miniskirt, he must have liked me, because he asked me for my number, called me the very next day, and made a date for the following week. The rest happened fast. I can remember everything about those early weeks, right down to the outfit I was wearing (a gray agnès b. skirt, white T-shirt, white Keds: already his minimalist taste was rubbing off on me) on the steamy June night that we declared our love for each other. It was a heady, passionate time, and it seemed to me (as it has seemed to young women in love since time immemorial) that love, passionate love, had indeed conquered all.

  In the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Anna that I read, the novelist Mona Simpson talks about her reaction to the book, which she read in her twenties. Had I read it at that age, I surely would have believed, as she did, that Anna and Vronsky were “right” to do what they did and that the disasters that befell them were due to the fact that the society in which they lived didn’t understand love and was just plain repressive to women. I would have ranted and raved that passion should trump intellect every time and that anyone who doesn’t follow her heart at every given moment is “settling,” which was the dirtiest word I could ever have used back then. If I had even noticed that there was a subplot about another couple—Levin and Kitty—I would have dismissed it as so much boring old bourgeois nonsense. “They’re just counterpoint,” I would have said, meaning that they were there only to underscore the great grandness that was Anna and Vronsky.

  But I didn’t read Anna Karenina then, I’m reading it now, and now—fourteen years later, sitting on my lounge chair looking out at the very romantic ocean—I see a completely different book. Suddenly, all the passion and torture that goes on between Anna and Vronsky, and all the disaster they incur, seems so pointless and silly to me: Even a blind person, or one who has lived in a cave all these years and has no idea how Anna Karenina will end, can see that Vronsky, for Anna, spells doom.

  So I guess I’m just lucky that I was wrong about Leo, that he really wasn’t Vronsky at all—or that his Vronskyisms are, I could say, leavened by Levin. While Anna and Vronsky’s relationship deterioriates over the years—partly because the Russian society is bent on punishing Anna, but also because a passion like theirs cannot live forever—ours has actually gotten better. In fact, sitting here reading as he sits on the next chair leafing through the New York Post, I realize that for all my intermittent frustrations with him, and the occasional blowups worthy of any Russian novel, we’ve actually been having a good year and that we keep having better years as we both get older and more tired and run out of energy to try to change, as they say in twelve-step programs, the things about each other we cannot change. I’ve more or less made my peace with the fact that he’s socially awkward and, more important, uninterested, and that his default personality position, his toggle switch, is stuck on “grumpy.” He seems to have made his peace, more or less, with what
ever faults he imagines that I have.

  Which is not to say I don’t occasionally find myself in medias crush or that I don’t long to have the delicious torture of a forbidden life. I miss secrecy and longing and anxiety: all the newness and unknownness and drama that are at the basis of adultery, whatever the time or place. I found myself growing weepy one insomniacal night recently when, for a change, I flipped on the TV and discovered some old French movie in which Gérard Depardieu’s wife discovers that he is having an affair with a neighbor. “I’m so jealous!” she screams at him. (Of course, it sounds so much less hackneyed in French.) He nods, assuming she’s talking sexual jealousy. “I hate that you’ve had all those wonderful stolen moments and those secrets,” she explains.

  I’m not sure that had Leo been awake and watching this with me he would have understood what was happening, or why I was crying. He’s way too Levin for that. But while his obliviousness to the subtlety of emotion is one of his traits that drives me craziest, I also realize that it is exactly the trait that has allowed me to have my own secret life, the one that takes place in my library at dawn or in the subway at rush hour or on this very deck where he sits beside me. He thinks of my compulsive reading and writing as “work” and he doesn’t much quiz me on it; I’m not about to tell him that I am, just like Anna and Emma, an adulteress. My books are my secret lovers, the friends I run to to get away from the daily drudgeries of life, to try out something new, and yes, to get away, for a few hours, from him. He doesn’t need to know that my books are the affairs I do not have.

  September 1

  Acknowledge This!

  You know you’re in a bad patch when the most interesting part of the book you’re reading is the acknowledgments page.

  On one sleepless night last week, I picked up Girls’ Poker Night, an upscale Bridget Jones’s Diary about a smart, and smart-talking, New York woman who has more of a lifestyle than a life, and who can’t seem to get past her emotional “issues” to have a decent relationship with an actual, real live man.