Tue 7 Jan 2020
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: ANTHONY BOURDAIN – Bone in the Throat.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
ANTHONY BOURDAIN – Bone in the Throat. Villard, hardcover, 1995. Bloomsbury, paperback, 2000.
Bourdain is Chef at one of Manhattan’s “hotter-than-hot” new dining spots, and this is his first novel. I sort of expeted another cozy food book and almost skipped it. Turned out it wasn’t, though.
Tommy Pagano isn’t one of the Boys, but he’s related to them. He’s sous chef at a restaurant in Little Italy controlled by his uncle Solly the Wig, who definitely is one of the Boys. Not one of the big boys, and not too highly thought of, but one of them. The Feds are after Solly and his boss, Charley Wagons, and they’re watching and turning everybody in sight.
The owner of he restaurant is wearing a wire and trying to keep everybody happy. Tommy gets dragged into the mess when he’s made an unwilling witness to some bad business by his uncle, and his dreams of becoming a big-time chef give way to nightmares about being a small-time con. Or maybe even a no-time-left corpse.
This was not a cozy, or even a “humorous” look at mob life. It’s got sort of a wry tone and a couple of the characters were a little exaggerated, but it would take a pretty odd sense of humor to call it funny.
The cooking background is interesting and not overdone, and Tommy Pagano is both a realistic and likable character. I don’t know anything about the Mafia, but these hoods seemed pretty genuine. Bourdain tells a good story with crisp dialog and well-drawn, if mostly sleazy characters, and I liked this.
January 7th, 2020 at 9:46 pm
No longer interested in reading books about gangsters, the Mafia, or hoodlums of any sort, there’s very little chance that I will ever get around to reading this book,. The author is still well known, though, and Barry liked it, so there was no question that his review of it should be posted. (I do omit some of the apazine reviews I am choosing from, but very few of them, and only those of no current interest to anyone. My judgment call, though.)
Barry would have read the hardcover first edition. In nice condition, Fine or better, the book is now offered for sale in the $200-$300 range.
January 8th, 2020 at 4:59 pm
I almost didn’t recognize the story as Barry describes it since to me the main character was the chef, a thinly disguised Boudain who was quite open about his drug addiction in the book. It is more a “slice of life” novel than a crime book but the writing is vivid the depiction of the mafia and mafia-controlled restauranting was pretty good. I would recommend the book.
January 8th, 2020 at 9:14 pm
Is this one actually written by Bourdain or ghosted in his name?
As for the Mob, save a comic Damon Runyon take I’m pretty fed up with that plot device too.
January 8th, 2020 at 9:41 pm
I’ve never seen anything to suggest that Bourdain didn’t write any of the books that came out under his name. On the other hand, once a “celebrity” starts writing books, you always have to wonder.
January 9th, 2020 at 2:30 pm
If you read Bourdain’s first book, “Kitchen Confidential” you would see that Bourdain can write, has a distinctive voice as well as a distinctive history, both of which appear in “Bone in the Throat.” So there is no need to assume that a ghost writer was involved.
As for The Mob… this was New York. Of course there were mobsters but this isn’t a book about the mob. It’s a story about a chef with a drug problem trying to keep his life from spirelling out of control. A mob hit in his restaurant was one of his problems. But only one.