IMMERSION: Buford’s research consists of becoming his subject. |
Bill Buford is an immersion writer. Long before joining the New Yorker, where he had the luxury of taking six months to research a profile, he tended to go, well, whole hog. The defining moment in his first book, Among the Thugs, came when he found himself joining in the soccer hooligan violence, just for the fuck-allness of it. The founding editor of Granta had become one with his thug subject.That chilling debut was a focused work of journalism: civilized man seeks to understand uncivil subculture. After witnessing (and being injured by) the violence, he returned home. Heat once again has Buford going for the gusto. But though his subject this time is more appetizing, this second book lacks the cohesion, and even the closure, of Among the Thugs.
The subculture Buford longs to enter in this time is that of the professional kitchen. In ways, it’s similar to the soccer pitch, a sweaty, hyper-masculine world of intensified emotion, one already well documented by chef Anthony Bourdain. And in a more literary, less profane, and also less funny way, Buford’s saga echoes much of Bourdain’s, as he works up from “kitchen bitch” to almost proficient cook. But in with this personal account, which would have made a grand book on its own, he weaves a starstruck profile of celebrity chef Mario Batali, the subject of that initial six-month assignment. Neither fish nor fowl, personal journey nor critical biography, Heat is an enjoyable repast but not as satisfying as it could have been.
To Buford, the dual focus of the book is necessary. The profile demanded the immersion: “I then got it into my head that I should undergo a miniversion of Mario’s own culinary education: knowing-the-man-by-knowing-his-teachers.” So off he goes: slaving in the kitchen, jetting off to Italy to learn pasta from the woman who taught Batali, apprenticing himself to a Tuscan butcher. Along the way, he does more writerly chores, searching, for example, through ancient cookbooks for the point in history where egg was introduced into pasta. But for the most part, his research consists of becoming his subject. And when that happens, it seems to surprise him. “Without my fully realizing it, my mission had changed. . . . I stopped being an author writing about the experience of the kitchen. I was a member of it.”
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Buford is at his best when he’s explaining this transformation. Sensitive, in love with his subject, he can say, “I found myself needing to understand short ribs,” and we’re with him. Describing the indirect lessons of the Maestro, the master butcher whose “hands were so big they made me uneasy,” he learns “the smell of good meat, which . . . , even in its rawness, makes you want to eat it.”He’s besotted, and his hero worship of such figures as the Maestro makes sense. But when he calls Batali “the most recognized chef in a city with more chefs than any other city in the world,” it interrupts the poetry of the food writing. Partly that’s because Batali has that Bourdain machismo, sexualizing everything (“Because it gives me so much wood” is a common encomium) while not always succeeding in his primary goal of creating good food. (“There were complaints,” Buford writes of Batali’s pizzas.) But largely this fawning grates because it goes against Buford’s critical sense. He may be an amateur in the kitchen, but this book is about learning what is good and why. In writing about Batali, he should have cut closer to the bone.
