Montreal Gazette

Saturday, December 16, 2000

Adam Gopnik, your table at Schwartz’s is waiting

By Jonathan Kay

***

A writer’s life rarely gets better than the one Adam Gopnik has lived these last five years.

Until recently, the Montreal-raised 44-year-old has been stationed in Paris, conducting his journalistic investigations in cafés, bistros and museums, immersing himself in what he justly calls "the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been." He has, in other words, taken a five-year French vacation, with the New Yorker magazine picking up the tab. As a journalist, I can only seethe with envy.

But after reading Gopnik’s recent essays, collected in his new book, "Paris to the Moon," it is clear to me why he managed to land such an attractive gig. The pieces are softly glowing literary gems. His gift for description is beyond what one expects from a magazine writer -- even at the New Yorker’s lofty level.

"Description is the credibility of criticism in the same way that winning is the credibility of football," he tells me during an interview. "And it’s something that -- to be honest -- I’ve laboured at obsessively. Early in my career, I worked with a wonderful New Yorker jazz writer named Whitney Balliett. I learned a lot. He had the hardest job I can imagine. He wrote about the sound of jazz, which, almost by definition, is impossible to describe."

But many of Gopnik’s subjects are every bit as elusive as the sounds of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Yet he invariably captures each with just a few elegant sentences. The French état, he writes in an outstanding essay about the 1998 trial of war criminal Maurice Papon, "intervenes between the nation, the repository of racial memory, beloved to the right, and the republic, repository of universal rights, beloved to the left ... letting them coexist." At a fashion show, he encounters a bumptious group of noisy photographers "who form, on their bleachers, a little island of happy heterosexual lust amid two seas of becalmed aestheticism." Then there is his short sketch of Paris itself: "Lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards, department stores with skylights, and windows like doors everywhere you look. It is not so much wounded -- all civilizations are that, since history wounds us all -- as chastened."

These examples are not condensed. Gopnik’s writing contains almost no scene-painting. A metaphor (a chastened civilization), an evocative detail (the lemon on a tray), a generalization (the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been), and that’s it. Like a marksman who scores a bull’s-eye with his first round, he quickly moves on to the next target.

It’s a style he practices self-consciously. "I enjoy writing that has the confidence to make universal claims," he tells me. "I always believe it carries its own irony. I appreciate the penchant for generalization and abstraction that is part of French literary life. Being in France released that quality in my own writing."

For a writer who enjoys writing in the first person, living abroad carried other advantages. "When you write about Paris for an American market, the I’s can become You’s. When you read the book, you should be able to say, ‘That could be me and my kid in Paris.’ Adam and Luke -- that’s just two names slapped on a North American father and a North American kid traveling in Paris. I can’t do that now that I’m back in New York. Everyone’s been to Times Square.

"Even in Paris, I made a rule for myself -- three third-person pieces for every first-person piece. I was scared the reaction would be ‘Oh, there’s Gopnik writing about his kid again. Great.’ I was really self-conscious. But the truth is that it was those pieces that were working, that people were responding to."

The trick lies in Gopnik’s sense of moderation. Luke’s appearances are catalysts for daddy’s social commentary -- not merely comic or cutesy relief. The young boy seldom speaks. In the essay "Distant Errors," for instance, he says only two words. Yet he injects greatness into an otherwise ordinary cafe vignette simply by banging away at the left flipper of a pinball machine.

"I’m obsessed," Gopnik tells me. "Having a child was like a religious conversion. It was by far the biggest door I’d ever walked through in my life. My kids aren’t a diversion for me. They’re the centre of my life."

And those kids might eventually bring Gopnik back to Montreal, where his family could find the house -- and space -- that is beyond their reach in Manhattan. After two decades in New York and Paris, Gopnik still thinks of Montreal as home.

His family came to the city from Philadelphia when he was 12 – and he did not leave until he was 24, spending the intervening years at Northmount High School, Dawson College (where he met his wife, Martha), and McGill University. "I love Montreal," he tells me. "I still root for the Expos and Canadiens."

In fact, Gopnik came close to making the move back this year, "When I was leaving Paris, I asked my editor if he wanted a ‘letter from Canada’ column. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem all that enthusiastic. But we may come to Montreal yet. The language thing would be no problem for us. We’ve already lived five years in a unilingual French city."

I ask if he’s planning to write the definitive essay about his home town for the New Yorker -- a sort of Adam and Luke’s Excellent Montreal Adventure. His eyes light up at the idea. "I’ve been wanting to do that for years!" (Luke, he tells me, has a Canadiens’ sweatshirt, as well as a Schwartz’s T-shirt.)

"I’ve had the first line in my head for a while: ‘Montreal is my home town.’ I think now may be the time to do it because the decline and fall of the Canadiens hockey team is such a rich subject -– and it would be a great lens through which to get at the city. I feel passionately about them because they got me through my adolescence. Seeing them in their mediocre state is painful."

Given his talents, my expectations are high. Steamés on Styrofoam? Dappled light on the Stade Olympique Astroturf? Department stores with French-only signs?