Sentimental Education
By Roger Gathman, Fri., Oct. 12, 2001
Every good New Yorker writer attracts a cencle of devotees. Some believe belles lettres flickered out when E.B. White died; others collect all the Julian Barnes articles. Sometime in the mid-Nineties, Adam Gopnick's "Letter From Paris" started doing that to me. Gopnick is our semi-official national Francophile. He achieved that position by being The New Yorker's Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. It is intrinsic to the flavor of Gopnick's pieces that he is very much the young urban professional father. His wife Martha, and his son Luke have more than walk-on roles in his essays -- their bemusement or innocence represent the reader's own. His essays aren't simply charming, they're compulsively discussable. I have a lot of francophile friends, and we all share our favorite bits -- the one about hunting down a "New York-style" gym, the one about Les Deux Magots, the formerly revered and now woefully unfashionable cafe.
But when Paris to the Moon, which collected these pieces, came out last year (now in paperback, Random House, $14.95), I wondered if the sprightliness of Gopnick's individual articles would survive being coagulated into a book. No need to worry: The pieces are stronger en masse, which throws into relief the larger narrative pattern of the Gopnick family's education sentimentale.
His essays mix doses of straight reportage (on such things as the trial of Maurice Papon for collaborating with the Nazis) with his more personal readings of expatriate living. Gopnick was conscious, of course, of his predecessors. "My two favorite books on Paris are A.J. Liebling's Between Meals and the stories Thurber wrote about the city -- most of them, I think, are in My World and Welcome to It," he told me recently from New York. "I never had a self-conscious ambition to write like him, I guess, but my pieces do have a Thurber-like structure -- the bemused wife, the precocious child, and the writer-father. The comedic tension was in me being a stroller with a stroller, a flneur with a poussette."
Back home for a year now, he's become, inevitably, the expert explainer of the Franco-American differance. "I think now, after the World Trade Center attack, people are starting to see that France's faith in the state isn't always bad," he said. "Of all places, the Wall Street Journal had an article a couple of days ago about how good the French security system was. After all, one of the reasons we had the hijacking is we made a decision in this country. We decided that the airline companies would take care of their security, and if they didn't spend the money on security, that was their decision. ... Well, the thing is, when the market works, that is a wonderful thing, but when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work.
"When I came back to New York, I felt like I was going from the chapel of Liebling to the chapel of Joseph Mitchell. And then, of course, the September 11 attack happens. I did a piece before the attack about the portents of the bubble bursting. And since the attack, I've been on my feet, trying to bear witness, if you could call it that. Certainly the one thing I didn't expect, coming from Paris back to New York, is that I'd be writing about plague and fire."
