Classic
Gopnik
Why he aspires to be the
“rococo, Jewish, city-bound, Canadian E.B. White.”
Up close with the writer poised to become a New Yorker great
And so, after five years in France, it came time for Adam Gopnik to leave. As
The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, he’d covered the trial of a former secretary-general
for complicity in war crimes during the Nazi occupation and the media circus that ensued
(“a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove”). He’d spoken with chefs on the state
of haute cuisine and watched the city shut down as mailmen and metro workers went on
strike. His journalism was good, but his personal essays on foreign culture—the comedies
of difference between Paris and New York City life—were especially well received.
The local gym was a far cry from its American counterpart, it turned out. A single weekly
visit was considered disciplined. In “The Rookie,” he’d tried to explain baseball to his son,
Luke—there were, understandably, few local teams—mythologizing its rules and rivalries for
added amusement. And in a recurring Gopnik theme, he would visit Luxembourg Gardens,
with its carousels and puppet shows, relics of old-world living. “You grasp more of French
life by seeing how they birth a baby than by following election returns,” he explained. Paris
to the Moon, a collection from his five-year correspondence, is now an international bestseller.
But in 2000, it was time to go home. He and his wife had a newborn daughter, and the
couple wanted to send their son to a New York school. Meanwhile, Gopnik had grown
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Ryerson review of journalism • Summer 2012
photoGRAPH BY Jody rogac BY
M AT T H E W
BRAGA
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“You learn
something about what
Adam thinks, and
you learn extraordinary
things about the world,”
says Malcolm
Gladwell. “But he
remains somewhat
opaque”
wary of repeating himself. “Your readers know it even if they
can’t put their finger on what it is,” he says. “The moment
I thought self-consciously about how I would engineer a
little comedy of difference”—learning how to drive, for
example—“that’s shtick.”
When the 55-year-old author and essayist writes about
himself, he’s not really the subject. We don’t read Adam
Gopnik to hear about him, but to hear from him—what
he thinks and how the world looks through his eyes. His
comic sentimental essays are not merely inward-looking
observations; he avoids self-indulgence in pursuit of a greater
truth. He excels at this style of writing—and yet, he is ready
to move on. His children are getting older, their experiences
no longer his to share. And so he writes about them less.
Where he once documented the death of his daughter’s fish
or his young son’s linguistic errors, he now draws connections
between Darwin and Lincoln instead. And just as he left
Paris, in part, fearful of shtick, he’d rather not be typecast
as the man who primarily writes about his kids.
In the prime of his career, he no longer hesitates to call
himself an essayist, and has set his sights on a higher standard defined by The New Yorker’s early literary greats—a
difficult goal for any writer to achieve. His focus has shifted
to grander, more humanist subjects, from information overload to the history of romanticized winter. But in becoming an old-school essayist, there is certainly an element of
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Ryerson review of journalism • Summer 2012
risk. On the one hand, readers are enthusiastic
about long-form writing again in a way that no
one could have predicted. Online sites such as
Longreads exist for the sole purpose of finding the best in-depth stories on the web. On
the other, a declining print industry means
smaller budgets and fewer features, things once
in abundance for essayists of old. And perhaps
most importantly, there is no guarantee that
new readers will take to Gopnik’s style, or that
it will succeed in any enduring way. But if a
classical revival is what Gopnik wants, there
might not be a better time than now.
Though Montreal remains his hometown, he is not, technically, Canadian. Born
in Philadelphia in 1956, he was 11 when his
family moved to Quebec. One of six children—
the only one not to have pursued a PhD—he
lived in Moshe Safdie’s ambitious Habitat 67
apartment complex.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in art history
from McGill in 1980, and met his future wife,
filmmaker Martha Parker. Later that year, the
couple hopped a bus to New York City. Following stints editing at GQ and the publishing house Knopf, he joined The New Yorker in
1986, after sending the magazine unsolicited
pieces—unsuccessfully—for years. His debut,
“Quattrocento Baseball,” combined two disparate topics—baseball and art history—in what
would become typical Gopnik fashion.
He spent the following years writing Talk of the Town
pieces, before the section had bylines. But CBC Ideas producer Paul Kennedy says Gopnik’s tales were easy to identify.
There were pieces about the writer’s SoHo loft, the building
full of “crazy artists, not making a lot of money, but with lots
of hopes and dreams,” says his friend. “They captured the
poignant essence of being an artist in New York.”
In one piece, simply titled “Hay,” from 1989, Gopnik
helped a conceptual artist rescue bales from a leaking apartment. “Water was coming through the ceiling,” he wrote,
“like blood in an old Vincent Price movie—slipping spookily
down the wall in sheets.” In a later story, his apartment fell
victim to a leak of its own, a strange sugary substance with
the colour and consistency of blood, another art project
gone awry. In Paris, he was happy to be rid of that old loft.
When the family returned to New York in 2000, Gopnik
found a different Manhattan than the one he left—safer,
cleaner, but far from innocent. There was 9/11, the smell
of burned buildings and buried bodies like “smoked mozzarella.” And in a piece titled “Last of the Metrozoids,” he
discussed the loss of his close friend and graduate school
mentor Kirk Varnedoe to cancer. While Paris to the Moon
detailed the changing metropolis of turn-of-the-century
France, Through the Children’s Gate was a coming-of-age
story of a country in mourning and a city in repair.
Gopnik still watches his beloved Montreal
Canadiens play from his home in New York.
Such is Gopnik’s man-about-town persona,
offering up slices of New York City life—though
not necessarily his own. Malcolm Gladwell jokingly referred to such essays as personal pieces
that don’t reveal anything personal. “You learn
something about what Adam thinks, and you
tend to learn extraordinary things about the
world,” says his New Yorker colleague. “But he
remains somewhat opaque. And I think that’s
actually quite lovely.”
There is a characteristic start to every
Gopnik story, says The New Yorker’s editorial
director, Henry Finder. With most writers,
assigning ideas means suggesting a few topics
and seeing what sticks. “But the experience is
very different with Adam,” says his editor. “You
can sort of choose any topic at random.”
After Gopnik bought a small Havanese
poodle last summer, Finder suggested a story
about dogs. Gopnik, however, was hesitant. He
wasn’t sure he would have anything to say. But
with a bit of prodding, Gopnik, in a breathless
account of dates, details, and facts, often finds
he has more to say about the topic at hand than
he initially thought.
“He will, almost in the process of letting
you down, start writing the piece,” says Finder. What once
seemed like a non-story becomes a finished, 4,000-word
piece the following week. But Gopnik says he wouldn’t be
able to get anything done were it not for the pile of reading
his editor suggests before the start of each piece.
While Finder is no doubt instrumental, Gopnik has a
knack for drawing unlikely connections between concepts
and people that might not seem obvious to anyone else. Take,
for example, Charlie Ravioli, the imaginary friend of his then
eight-year-old daughter, Olivia. “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli”
is one of Gopnik’s most popular pieces. What is, on the
surface, an absurd story of childhood imagination—many
children have a made-up friend, but Olivia’s might be the
only one too busy to play with her—is actually a smartly
worded commentary on the hustle and bustle of New York
City life. It’s a technique Gopnik uses often. The death of
his daughter’s goldfish is actually about the larger theme
of mortality. A trip to the farmer’s market with a handful
of chefs reveals that cooking is not all that dissimilar from
writing. The final product, be it soup or story, unites people
around a table in consumption and conversation.
“The key to writing—at least, the kind of writing that I
do, the kind of personal essays I write,” Adam explains, “is
that the ‘I’ has to become ‘you.’” In the series of apartment
pieces that Kennedy found so endearing, the reader isn’t
expected to actually identify with the antics of Gopnik’s
photoGRAPH BY Luke Gopnik-Parker SoHo neighbours, but with the concept of crazy neighbours—the idea that everyone has at least one. It’s about
making the experience relatable. Even if, on the surface, the
topic isn’t something that seems immediately familiar—say,
a community of feral parrots in “Power and the Parrot”—
Gopnik eventually makes the connection. The parrots, which
come from outside North America, recall the country’s
ethnic origins—their nests “only slightly smaller than the
spaces that are usually rented in the city… for nine hundred
dollars a month.” Forced to adapt, the non-indigenous birds
are a proxy for new immigrants to old New York. And for
second- and even third-generation Americans, it’s a concept
with which many can relate.
The comic sentimental essay, says Gopnik, is “a kind
of antimemoir, a nonconfession confession, whose point is
not to strip experience bare, but to use experience for some
other purpose: to draw a moral or construct an argument,
make a case or just tell a joke.” Though all personal writing
starts from the inside, with an inner passion or obsession, it’s
not a colonoscopy. Of the writers he admires, this approach
to writing is not uncommon.
Gopnik points to the English author Virginia Woolf, for
example, who wrote essays on everything from feminism
to food in the early 20th century, or golden-era New Yorker
journalist A.J. Liebling’s stories on the intricacies of war and
Summer 2012 • Ryerson review of journalism
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boxing. “You can’t be an essayist on a single subject,” explains
Gopnik. “Then you’re not an essayist, you’re an expert.” A
New York Times obituary following Liebling’s death in 1963
said that as his style matured, “it became convoluted, subtle
and abounding in unlikely allusions.” Recounting a fight, for
example, “might be a delicate embroidery on a theme suggested by a medieval Arabian historian.” He was an amateur
boxer in his younger years, and even spent a year in Paris.
As with E.B. White, who wrote about pigs on his farm
and the accents of Maine residents, to riff imaginatively on a
variety of topics requires the mundanity of everyday life. Be
it tales of weekly psychoanalysis sessions or his son’s football
team, Gopnik mediates on the broomstick, not the witch’s
broom. White, for example, realized during his early days
at The New Yorker “that writing of the small things of the
day, the trivial matters of the heart . . . was the only kind of
creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or
grace.” Gopnik, to an extent, is of a similar breed. Both have
taste buds and their little geniuses reflect flatteringly on their
own achievements.” It wasn’t exactly glowing. Nor was a
1996 Salon article that decried the “tortured sentences and
haphazard arguments” used to convey the mundane details
of Gopnik’s Parisian life.
“With critics,” says Gopnik, “the things that they don’t
like are always the things that you’re best at.” Writing, to
him, is a business of perfection, and every sentence should
shine with its own unique charm. “But if you’re seen to
digress, readers hate that,” he admits. “They feel it’s selfindulgent, that you’re imposing on their time.”
In her 1999 book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker,
Renata Adler, a former writer at the magazine, characterized
the distinctive structure of a Gopnik piece. Each would
begin by presenting a commonly held belief, she said, and
then work to disprove it. “Here is what I have discovered is,
in fact, the case,” mimicked Adler, “and present to you here,
at this very moment, for the first time, ever.” There were
“The moment I thought selfconsciously about how I would engineer
a little comedy of difference”—for
example, learning how to drive—“that’s
shtick,” says Gopnik
GOPNIK ON…
John Stuart Mill
“You think of him as the
absolute Englishman, but
he was a wild francophile
who was buried in France
because he preferred the
country to England.”
Garrison Keillor
“The greatest storyteller of
our time. There’s not a single
Lake Wobegon story that I
don’t take pleasure in reading in bed at night.”
Calvin Trillin
“He is an immensely affable,
funny, folksy family guy.
But he has been through
all the normal traumas of
human existence, and they
leave less trace on his voice
than they do on his self.”
John Milton
“Reading Paradise Lost, I
was so excited by it I went
to Mister Steer, a hamburger
place in Montreal, and I just
sat, ate a burger, and read.”
E.B. White
“I have a certain—probably
deplorable—editorializing,
moralizing vein, and I see
that in White as well.”
Randall Jarrell
written children’s books—White is the author of Charlotte’s
Web—and published collected essays outside the magazine.
But times have changed. Perhaps a more pressing question for the wider journalism community is how many
publications are still willing—and financially capable—to
support the kind of writing Gopnik wants to do. Many
magazines, he suspects, now essentially live online, with “a
sort of memorial issue that no one sees.” But still he remains
loyal to print, a disciple of Liebling, Woolf, and White.
“And however inadequate I am,” he says, “that’s certainly
the measuring rod I’d like to see used.”
Bullshit. That’s what New Yorker editor David Remnick
thinks of Gopnik’s critics. One piece in particular seems to
set him on edge. In 2007, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott pointedly asked if Gopnik was “put on this earth to annoy” before
launching into a scathing critique of Through the Children’s
Gate. “This bountiful note of yuppie triumphalism warbles
through the book,” he wrote of the family, as “their exalted
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Ryerson review of journalism • Summer 2012
numerous problems with this approach, she argued—foremost, that it treated readers as idiots, and painted Gopnik as
the progenitor of new and amazing thoughts. But as far as
Remnick is concerned, “The day any of these people write
anything even remotely as fine and intelligent as Adam
Gopnik will be a cold day in hell.” The New Yorker has long
reveled in the sort of highbrow intellectualism that some
revere and others resent. Gopnik is a frequent target of
both sentiments. But such critiques miss the point. They
misunderstand the Gopnik essence, says Finder—not selfdisplay for its own sake, but in service of a greater narrative.
Gopnik does admit that there are times when “the ‘I’ stubbornly refuses to become a ‘you,’” and those are the stories
that often fail to resonate. He’s become a regular at the
Moth, a New York-based collective of storytellers that holds
regular spoken-word events. The stories are often personal,
though far from confessional. Gopnik adapted “Bumping
into Mr. Ravioli,” for example, and performed his popular
“LOL” story—about a miscommunication with his son over
“One of the writers I most
admire. He had a terribly difficult inner life and ended up
committing suicide. But his
voice is one of just matchless
ebullience and life-affirming
wit and charm.”
Woody Allen
“The awkwardness is part of
the authenticity. But it’s not
that way in writing. Awkward on the page is just
awkward.”
Karl Popper
“I thought he was the greatest philosopher in the world.
But to my shock, he was
the most irascibly paranoid
human being who had ever
lived, like a wounded panther in his resentments.”
the meaning of the internet initialism—for
the first time. Both were well received because
they were situations the audience could identify
with. But another performance, in which he
told a story about a conference he was invited
to speak at, “didn’t work nearly as well.” It was
the type of situation, Gopnik suspects, with
which few could relate.
But the Moth helped his writing—not only
in the types of stories he tells, but how he tells
them. “The listener can’t turn the page back,”
he explains. “It reminded me, at a time when I
felt my stuff was getting a little too meandering, of the value of that kind of simplicity of
approach, and that kind of linear storytelling.”
TOP: Gopnik with his two kids,
Luke and Olivia, in Central Park.
BELOW: Olivia’s old imaginary
friend was the subject of one of
Gopnik’s most popular stories.
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In Adam Gopnik’s wallet is a Canadian
$5 bill—a “nostalgic image of national spirit”
that depicts children playing hockey on a frozen
pond. It’s a reminder of his youth in Montreal,
watching hockey behind the school and playing hooky in the city’s underground malls. It
is also the subject of one of his essays from
Winter: Five Windows on the Season, one of his
two books released last fall. He used myriad
examples, from the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s
“River” to the inventor of the modern central
heating system in England, to frame the historical context of the season. Anansi House Press
packaged the essays together as a book, and
Gopnik delivered them as a series of Massey
Lectures for the CBC in five Canadian cities.
In Angels and Ages, a relatively short 2009
book comparing Darwin and Lincoln, it wasn’t
a question of who these men were but “what
were they like?” He imagined Darwin, for
example, would “frown and furrow his brow and
make helpless embarrassed harrumphs” were
he around to suffer our questions today. It’s a
completely different approach from Gopnik’s
usual fare, which, with a few small exceptions,
is barely rooted in personal themes.
Kennedy was amazed that Gopnik could
link such seemingly disparate figures together.
“But Adam has read enough to know he can
make those kind of comparisons,” he says,
“without putting himself at risk of being
called an intellectual charlatan.” When the pair
toured Canada for the Massey Lecture series,
an incredulous Kennedy watched from across
the aisle of their plane as his friend spread
four research books across the tray table—on a
flight that was barely an hour long. “I’m losing
my hair, my memory, and probably my skills,”
Gopnik jokes, “but my ability to read seems to
get greater as I get older.”
Indeed, over the course of an hour, he refer-
Photographs: top BY Deborah Copaken Kogan; bottom BY Yvonne Brooks
ences artists, intellectuals, and writers too many to count.
One minute it’s National Hockey League commissioner
Gary Bettman and the next, philosophers John Stuart
Mill and Oswald Spengler. He doesn’t name them idly,
but to back up an argument or make a point—categorical
knowledge that he has been honing for years. He feels more
comfortable calling himself an essayist these days, “one of
the last of a vanishing kind.”
Others go so far as to describe him as a polymath and a
raconteur, practised and interested in a variety of areas. He
plays the piano, and would love to become a songwriter, he
admits, a hobby he is pursuing now (a musical adaptation of
Through the Children’s Gate is in the works). He has written
two children’s books, The King in the Window and The Steps
Across the Water—the latter takes place in the supposedly
fictional, sprawling, skyscraping city of U Nork. Despite
his art history degree, he was never particularly artistic,
and spent last spring learning to draw. “Jesus, you’re going
to try and top me at that, too, are you?’” says New Yorker
artist Bruce McCall with a laugh. “With his application,
discipline, and imagination, he’ll probably end up being a
better artist than me, too.”
Adam Gopnik looks tired. It is a late fall morning
in Toronto, his second book tour in less than a month.
He’s on deadline. I’m the latest in a string of back-to-back
meetings, and it’s not even 11 a.m. But while protestors
occupy the park outside, Adam is occupied promoting his
latest book, The Table Comes First. It’s a mix of past articles
and original pieces, with a focus on “family, France, and
the meaning of food.” There are personal anecdotes and
tales sprinkled throughout, with his own family—or, more
precisely, his mother’s Grand Marnier soufflé—driving much
of the narrative. It follows a familiar Gopnik formula, but
it’s still more Winter than Through the Children’s Gate.
I ask about his shift away from the more traditional
personal essays that buoyed his magazine fame. We’re a
long way from “Quattrocento Baseball,” and the things he
wrote about in his 20s are not what he writes about today.
In response, he recites a line from the great Irish-American
writer Frank O’Connor: “And anything that happened to
me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.”
To him, that’s the invisible last line to every essay he’s ever
written. Essay writing requires a certain curiosity, a desire
to learn. Writers should come out of the process knowing
more than when they began. He couldn’t write about the
same thing twice, even if he wanted to. The shift may not be
conscious, but it’s necessary. “That was one body of work,”
he says, “and this is another.”
Luke, after all, is no longer the young wanderer of Luxembourg Gardens. The arrival of Olivia’s imaginary friend
seems like eons ago. Now that his children are older, there
are but two rules: no piercings below the belt and no bitter
memoirs. That hasn’t stopped them from threatening the
latter, however. They’ve even come up with titles, riffs on
their father’s work. Olivia’s would be called The Other Side
of the Gate, while Luke’s would be Ages and Ages. But if they
didn’t want to have their lives written about, Gopnik jokes,
they shouldn’t have been born to a writer.
There’s a scene in Through the Children’s Gate in which
Gopnik returns to New York. “This isn’t a true Gothic cathedral,” he complains about St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “There are
such things, I’ve seen them, and this is just a…copy, a raw
inflated thing thrown up in emulation of a far-off and distant
thing! That Renaissance palazzo on Fifty-fourth Street is
no Renaissance palazzo—it’s a cheap stage-set imitation!”
But it soon becomes clear that the city remains
unchanged—just perceived differently in light of recent
experience. And it strikes me that his writing is the same.
Not a cheap-set imitation, mind you; rather, he is still writing comic-sentimental essays, even if the scope and scale
have changed. Readers can bemoan the departure, but he is
still Adam Gopnik. Winter, Angels and Ages, and even The
Table Comes First are different, but also the same—Gopnik
amplified. “And now New York just looks like New York,”
he writes: “Old as time, worn as Rome, mysterious as life.”
His wife toys with the idea of moving to the Connecticut
countryside, away from the bustle of city life. And he knows
E.B. White lived much of his life on a farm in Maine. But
Gopnik doubts he’ll ever truly leave. To be the “rococo, Jewish, city-bound, Canadian E.B. White”—his words—would
make him extremely happy. “But,” he admits, “I don’t know
that I’ve earned that.”
❰❱
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