“Off, Butterscotch!” Gopnik yelled from his doorway, as his one-year-old Havanese gleefully hopped up my leg. With his tuft of receding hair mussed and his white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, rolled up at the sleeves, and untucked, he had dogs on the brain that afternoon. “I never used to like dogs,” he said. “I was afraid of them, but my daughter, Olivia, convinced my wife and me to get one, and now I’m obsessed.” Dogs are yet another of the obsessions that have defined his twenty-five-year career as a staff writer at The New Yorker. “I go to my editor Henry Finder at the beginning of every year and talk through the list of what I’m obsessing over,” he told me, before heading over to the magazine’s Times Square offices later that afternoon to put the finishing touches on “Dog Story” for the August 8 issue.
He whisked me into his spacious living room, with its white couches and bank of windows. On the walls hang the French engraving that inspired his best-known book, Paris to the Moon; and several family photographs, including one of his wife of thirty years, the filmmaker Martha Parker — decked out in a flowing white dress and hugely pregnant with their son Luke — shot by Richard Avedon. Below, on a Persian area rug, sits a stack of hardcover copies of his book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York. “This is what I do with unsold books instead of putting them in remainder,” he quipped as we walked past, glumly suggesting that the only place the book sold well, surprisingly, was in Italy, in Italian.
At fifty-five, Gopnik stands at the peak of his career. He has written six books to date (two of them for children), including the acclaimed Paris to the Moon and Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, as well as countless articles of varying length for The New Yorker. This fall, he is publishing two new books, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food and Winter, which he is delivering across Canada this fall as the 2011 CBC Massey Lectures.
While The Table Comes First follows the winning formula for his earlier books — developing previously published New Yorker pieces and writing additional essays that link them into a more or less coherent whole — Winter represents a substantial departure. Divided into five chapters, or lectures, on various aspects of the season, this sustained meditation relies less on the idiosyncratic stories and characters that work so well in his New Yorker pieces, and more on philosophical ruminations about everything from Lawren Harris’s paintings to arctic travel to Christmas to hockey. Gopnik built his reputation as an urbane, witty, and lyrical stylist by gracefully modulating his stories between the romantic comedy of family life and the brilliant obsessive-compulsives that populate metropolises like Paris and New York. Among the recent generations of New Yorker writers, his temperament most closely resembles that of the magazine’s early pantheon: E. B. White, James Thurber, St. Clair McKelway, A. J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. The Massey Lectures, now marking their fiftieth year, put Gopnik in different but no less formidable company (over the years, they have been delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss, George Steiner, Doris Lessing, Jane Jacobs, Michael Ignatieff, and Charles Taylor, among others), and he remains acutely aware that he won’t get by on charm alone. At their best, the Massey Lectures have served as a forum for major thinkers to present the core of their vision, and it’s unclear as yet whether Gopnik as a thinker rather than as an agile stylist has the depth and breadth to meet the high standards the series has established.
Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia in 1956, the son of two students at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1968 the family (he has four sisters and one brother) left the dark politics of Vietnam-era America for academic jobs in Montreal, and an apartment in Moshe Safdie’s new Habitat 67. He went to CEGEP at Dawson College, where he fell in love with his future wife, and then on to McGill; in 1980, he and Parker packed their bags, boarded a bus, and headed for New York, where he started graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
There, he wrote his master’s thesis on Leonardo da Vinci’s dazzling, and hilarious, grotesques: women with bulbous heads and monkey-like faces, toothless old men in doges’ hats with long noses and protruding chins. Gopnik was on his way to writing a dissertation on Picasso’s caricatures when he dropped out. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” he told me, laughing. Getting a Ph.D. is practically de rigueur in his family, and he’s the only one of his siblings who never completed a doctorate. “I didn’t want to be a professor. I was writing humour pieces all along, slipping them under the door of The New Yorker,” he said. “I went to graduate school as a way of getting to New York. Then I met Kirk Varnedoe, an amazing teacher, and we became good friends. I probably stayed in graduate school too long because of him.”
His extensive academic training didn’t go to waste. In 1986, The New Yorker finally published one of those humour pieces he had been slipping under the door, “Quattrocento Baseball,” a brilliantly funny excursus he had written years earlier on his twin loves, baseball and Renaissance painting. “I am by vocation a student of fifteenth-century Italian art and a fan of the Montreal Expos,” the piece begins. “It is a mixture of callings that provokes more indulgent smiles than raised eyebrows… I have tried to imagine a pasture on the slopes of Parnassus where Bill Lee plays pepper with Giorgione and Fra Filippo Lippi calls off Warren Cromartie.” The piece has all the hallmarks of Gopnik’s style: the self-deprecating humour, the natural elision between high culture and popular culture, the eclectic erudition, and prose that weds Thurber’s deadpan vernacular with the polished high-wire act of John Updike’s ornate constructions. It wasn’t long before he was hired on at The New Yorker, where writing Talk of the Town pieces launched his apprenticeship as a reporter.
In 1995, he, his wife, and their infant son moved to Paris. They had talked about living in France for years, and anyway their SoHo loft was infested with rats. For the next five years, he wrote on everything French, from the country’s nearly metaphysical passion for bureaucracy, to the surrealism of haute couture and the crisis in French cuisine, to the trial of a Vichy collaborator, to family life in the City of Light. The result was the bestselling Paris to the Moon, an ecstatic, wide-eyed, wryly sentimental book. It tells about discovering a place he already loved, and about creating the intimacy of a family, which is why the series of Christmas journals that weaves the book together is its most moving and successful part. “He rides the carousel,” he writes of the days he and his son spent in the Luxembourg Gardens, “the fallen leaves piled neatly all around it, and though bent-up it is a beauty. The animals are chipped, the paint is peeling, the giraffe and elephant are missing hooves and tusks, and the carousel is musicless and graceless.” Gopnik is an aesthete, but unlike many of his fellow students of fifteenth-century Italian painting he is not an elitist; he is an aesthete of ordinary and intimate pleasures.
“Paris is always there. You can keep Paris,” he commented as we sat drinking iced coffee in a sun-drenched nook in a corner of his living room, overlooking Eighty-Eighth Street. He was, in fact, leaving for Paris in two days to stay with a friend on the Left Bank. “But you’re always losing New York. If you had told me in 1980 that this would become one of the safest places in the United States, that you could go out and take walks at night in Central Park, I would have thought you were insane.” When he moved back to New York in the new millennium, not only had the city reinvented itself once again during his absence, but he had changed as well: no longer the bohemian SoHo writer, he was now a family man with a new baby daughter, bidding on apartments in doorman buildings on the Upper East Side.
