James Wolcott is a contributing writer to Vanity Fair.
Through the Children's Gate:
A Home in New York
By Adam Gopnik
(Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pp., $25)
I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. Ifso, mission accomplished. Mind you, he finds himself in finecompany in my illustrious literary perp walk. Francine Prose, withher pinched perceptions and humorless hauteur--every time shebrings out a new book (she is depressingly diligent), I find myselfgrumbling, "Her again?" I've never gotten the point of Paul Austerand his swami mystique and probably never shall, unless I move toBrooklyn and achieve phosphorescence. Walter Kirn, what a hustler.But no tactician of letters has shown a greater knack for worminghis way into our hearts whether we want him there or not than AdamGopnik, the art- world observer, former Paris correspondent for TheNew Yorker (out of whose dispatches was spun the bestselling Paristo the Moon), and the magazine's resident tone-poet of post-9/11Manhattan, drizzling pixie dust across a cityscape that no longerbears the hearty flavor of "smoked mozzarella," as he notoriouslydescribed the downtown death smell. It isn't that Gopnik isungifted or imperceptive, or a slickster trickster like hiscolleague Malcolm Gladwell, who markets marketing. He is avidlytalented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaverwhose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until thepreciosity simply becomes too much.
A careerist with delicate antennae, he wants to be encouraged,petted, praised, promoted, and congratulated. (In Gone: The LastDays of The New Yorker, Renata Adler memorably encapsulated hismodus operandi: "I had learned over the course of conversationswith Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or evenquite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advisinghim to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.") Heis forever soliciting the reader's approval with an array ofcloying ploys that become gimmicky and self-conscious. If he can beconsidered guilty of "meaching" (Adler's picturesque word), it mustbe conceded that he has meached his way to the journalistic top,and an air of attainment cups his latest themed collection, Throughthe Children's Gate. Gopnik's Manhattan in these pages recallsWoody Allen's playground circa 1986 (the year of Hannah and HerSisters, the year Gopnik began writing for The New Yorker), an UpperEast Side version of pastoral set to the cabaret tinkle of a pianoplaying in the next room and the cricket chirps of names andcultural signifiers being dropped. But where there were fewchildren noisily underfoot in Woody Allen's cinematic parlor,entering Through the Children's Gate is like visiting MunchkinLand, with Gopnik as Munchkin mayor.
After extracting as much good copy as contemporary Paris had tooffer, Gopnik and family--wife Martha, son Luke, and daughterOlivia--returned to New York in 2000 to "make a home here forgood," free of French exactitude. The Children's Gate was theirport of entry. "The Children's Gate exists, and you really can gothrough it. It's the name for the entrance to Central Park atSeventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.... Now my family had, in away, decided to pass through as children, too." In the familyunit's absence from New York, the patter of little feet had becomethundering hooves. "[By] the time we came home, the city had beenrepopulated--some would say overrun--with children. It was now thedrug addicts and transvestites and artists who were left mutteringabout the undesirable, short element taking over the neighborhood.New York had become, almost comically, a children's city again,with kiddie-coiffure joints where sex shops had once stood andbare, ruined singles bars turned into play- and-party centers."Convoys of baby strollers cruised sidewalks once crunchy with crackvials, and the Times Square where Travis Bickle hunched hisshoulders in the steam-risen satanic night was now a diorama ofDisney favorites.
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