Fri, 29 Feb 2008
Through the Children's Gate
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate, Vintage
You might have heard of Adam Gopnik already. He's worked for the New
Yorker and the International Herald Tribune and while the Paris correspondent
for the latter, he wrote Paris to the Moon, which the publishers say is a
bestseller.
The children's gate in the title refers to one of the gates into Central
Park in NYC. Gopnik recently returned to NYC to live after his decade long
assignment in Paris. He and his wife and two children returned with some
delight and this book, a collection of stories, looks at aspects of NYC,
including Gopnik's relationship to it, with great fondness and quite a lot of
humour.
If the mention of the New Yorker and the IHT suggests to you lovely
crafted prose in the polite idiom, that's exactly what you get here and
fans of NYC will spend a nice few evenings chuckling and shaking their heads
at different aspects of the place - the eternal change, the gentrification
and ridiculous rents, the largely successful war on criminals, and the
effective banishment of the odd to the outer boroughs - all this plus a
small feature on being (not very) Jewish today in NYC. There's a hilarious
tale of his understanding of what LOL means and a nice short Jack Benny
joke - 'Your money or your life!' the robber says to Benny. 'I'm thinking it
over' is his reply.
In all of this he is a fond yet unsentimental observer - things change.
It's almost an opposite to Plus ca la meme change, plus ca la meme chose -
something that might be said often in his last hometown.
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here