Colin Marshall

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Adam Gopnik’s fans have endured an awful dry spell since 2000, when the longtime New Yorker essayist’s previous collection, Paris to the Moon, saw publication. His polished, observant prose made the recounted experience of living and raising a child in what is quite possibly the world’s most romanticized city resonant and even recognizable. Having spent the subsequent half-decade in New York, quite possibly the world’s second-most romanticized city, he’s put out a spiritual sequel – a new backdrop, a new character in the form of a small daughter – in Through the Children’s Gate.

As so many parents of students abroad discover, extended stays in France have long-term effects on the visitor, not all of them unequivocally positive. Gopnik’s penchant for building grand questions – and, occasionally, their answers – out of the rarely-examined stuff of everyday life, already humming along in his last project, hits top gear in his newest. Taking a cue from his continental colleagues, he’s enthusiastically embraced a host of shopworn devices: the startling contradiction, the majestic juxtaposition, the epic inference. This is not always to the good – the sociological blustering pioneered by genuinely French commentators is, disappointingly, not entirely absent – but, tempered by Gopnik’s characteristic restraint and uncertainty, it makes for a fascinating verbal lens through which to view existence in New York.

Indeed, if the well-traveled, Canadian-born Gopnik has a stylistic angle, it’s that of a uniquely international perspective on things uniquely New York. This might sound tiring, and sometimes it is, for instance when the author stretches four Thanksgiving pieces into increasingly desperate attempts to squeeze overarching meaning from events. Speculation about what might have been laid bare by the public’s reaction to September 11^th feels obligatory. Ambitious meandering constitutes, luckily for the reader, the exception rather than the rule: moment after well-placed moment, rich reflection after unexpected truth attest that Gopnik really is good enough to pull off a new exploration of familiar ground.

At their best, the essays comment simultaneously upon the vagaries of parenthood and New York residence, all the while extrapolating to the universal human experience. Gopnik’s years with an eccentric octogenarian analyst make a fine slice of humor, but the recollection functions equally well as rumination on how life itself should be approached. Make no mistake, it takes real skill to build anything out of the ramblings of an old Freudian whose ultimate piece of advice is the suggestion that “life has many worthwhile aspects,” and Gopnik possesses it. Equally engaging are his thoughts and his transcription of others’ thoughts on the nature of learning, teaching and expertise, the best of which come in “Last of the Metrozoids”, a masterful account of art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s final months spent coaching young Luke Gopnik’s team of eight-year-old football players.

Luke’s presence – an older and, in a certain precocious pre-adolescent way, wiser one – remains nearly as important as in Paris to the Moon, helping to put Dad into perspective whenever a bout of convoluted contemplation entangles the elder Gopnik. Olivia, the young daughter, gets cast as a sort of lifestyle mirror, reflecting the supposed absurdities of the New York way through childhood mimicry. Alas, wife Martha reprises her part as a vaguely-defined character sketch, though she’s a welcome almost-foil to the author when big parenting decisions must be addressed, such as the one you make upon finding the beloved goldfish, a New York kid’s pet if there ever was one, floating.

One suspects, in any case, that the real main character is the quintessential bustling metropolis itself. The essence of this “protagonist” most clearly emerges, however, through mere humans. A handful of remarks on the design, history and appearance of the city appear as well – a few previously published articles of a more journalistic nature are wedged in, none of which sit particularly well alongside the rest of the material – but it’s in the words and actions of Gopnik, his friends and his family that New York comes through. Despite slow points and hitches, Through the Children’s Gate amounts to one of the most eloquent, refined accounts of parenting and New York life in recent memory; that so many have assumed those wells dry makes the whole venture a pleasant surprise.

Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

If his body of work is anything to go by, Haruki Murakami bears ambivalence toward a great many things: his homeland, the literary establishment, his generation, the stability of identity and the conventions of narrative structure, to name but a few. Even if he doesn’t really feel that way on a personal level, you’d be hard pressed not to get the impression after reading his new career-spanning short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, the form of which casts the author’s signature themes into sharp relief. For those who embrace Murakami’s -- and, to an extent, modern Japanese literature’s -- Spartan prose, on-and-off surrealism and oblique plotting, this book serves 24 pure helpings of the drug of choice.
    The remaining majority of the literati may be left with bewilderment-furrowed brows, but Murakami has never written to capture the mainstream. After his novel Norwegian Wood (of which this collection’s “Firefly” was a prototype) spread epidemically, the mild novelist fled Japan to escape the vagaries of notoriety. The spurning of easy acceptance runs all the way through this collection, from Murakami’s very first venture into short story composition to a cluster written, very recently, in a flurry of near-obsessive inspiration. Some pieces are reasonably clear allegories, as when a baker’s disastrous attempt to feed his newly-invented cakes to a pack of inexplicably well-regarded tasting crows parallels the tension between a young Murakami’s unorthodox work and the existing Japanese literary scene. Others stonewall with their sheer peculiarity; one wonders who on Earth could immediately unpack the symbolism of a job interview that turns out to be conducted by a stressed-out miniature bird.
    Working with a small fraction a novel’s word count, Murakami pitches his short works of fiction between slices of life and thought experiments. Like the author, the protagonists are sometimes, though not always, Japanese men born soon after the war, and they share a tendency to linger and observe their life even as it happens to them, drifting where they’re taken and reflecting upon the current moment as a distant memory. Generally, the tone and – even in translation – the language work together, to addictive effect. His writing conjures, as one character observes of his mysterious, tightrope-walking temporary lover, the presence of “some indefinable but persistent something.”
    From a critical perspective, this frustrates. Murakami’s fiction oscillates so rapidly between arid truth and wild fantasy, between sharp insight and bizarre construction that pinning it down nears impossibility. Few writers of his generation have managed to articulate the mindset of the 1960s as elegantly as when he states that “everything was simple, and direct. Cause and effect were good buddies back then; thesis and reality hugged each other like it was the most natural thing in the world. And my guess is that the sixties were the last time that’ll ever happen.” Then again, few writers of his – or, indeed, any – generation can spin almost plausible tales of talking monkeys who scurry through cities, stealing peoples’ names.
    Stephen King’s chief talent, it’s often said, is a knack for juxtaposing the mundane details of real life with vivid, harrowing descriptions of the horrific. Haruki Murakami’s talent, by the same token, is the ability to juxtapose what read like prosaic internal monologues against the shifting, dreamlike buildups they depict, with the occasional cultural – usually musical – reference inserted for grounding. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the trophy case this skill has built, an exhibition of pure, concentrated Murakami. Though the uninitiated will likely prefer a gentler introduction along the lines of Norwegian Wood or the novel Sputnik Sweetheart, devotees will wish the book’s continuation on into infinity.

Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

Though this reviewer counts himself as one of the uninitiated, Neil Gaiman is said to possess a large, devoted fan base. Cursory investigation on the internet reveals that this base is, in large part, composed of black-clad teenage girls enamored with his dark, rumpled appearance and wily British ways. That’s all well and good, but the question remains: can the man write? Many sources reply with an emphatic yes, valuing his work as fantasy without the puerile trappings to which that genre often falls victim. Fragile Things, Gaiman’s new collection of “short stories and wonders”, provides a glimpse of the writer’s appeal, but unfortunately, the scraps that have found their way into the book never cohere into anything substantial.
    Then again, perhaps that was his intention. In the compilation’s lengthy introduction, Gaiman expounds upon the origins of the project – originally intended, for example, to contain only prose; a handful of poems were added because “the book would cost you the same with or without them” – and of each story and/or wonder in particular. While sometimes useful as context, all this explication primarily communicates the following the common reader: There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of fans out there more intimately familiar with the oeuvre of Neil Gaiman than you will ever be, people who salivate over each and every one of his words. While you may be left cold by a lot of this stuff, others are already on their third read through.
    That isn’t to say that Fragile Things comprises mediocre fluff palatable solely to diehards. Several of the stories included are prestigious award-winners; the best of the bunch, a collision of the worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, received a Hugo. However, just like the images on its oddly designed cover, the pieces seem to have been inserted without rhyme or reason. Their original venues of publication range from McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales to The Matrix’s official website. A real-life ghost story here, a poem about returning to nature there, a short bit of fiction that loops infinitely in on itself after that; the unpredictability is fun at times, but it couldn’t be called an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination.
    As such, the book showcases Gaiman’s skills unevenly. At his best, he breathes life into the sorts of scenarios one might idly wonder about but not carry to their logical conclusions. What if, for example, a harlequin decamped from the world of the commedia dell’arte to our modern one? What if things could go on living, despite being eaten? What if the Bible had one last, very brief, book? These and other questions are, after a fashion, answered, and cleverly so. At his worst, Gaiman’s affectations enslave his writing. (Notably, this is an impression one gets from his more devoted followers as well.) Some pieces are spun too far from conceits too thin, as when the months of the year are personified as storytellers around a campfire or a group of gourmands tiresomely seeks an apocryphal bird.
    When myth meets reality, Gaiman’s work resonates both the most and the least. If this compilation is any indicator, what happens at the intersection of the two constitutes his staked-out territory, and the results are alternately brilliantly amusing and somewhat flat. It’s distinctly possible that this release isn’t intended for the casual Gaiman reader; that the final 54 pages constitutes a novella revisiting American Gods, an earlier novel, suggests as much. While more often entertaining than not, Fragile Things may be best left to the girls in black.

Jay McInerney, A Hedonist in the Cellar

The world of wine writing can seem a confusing tangle of high-flown descriptors and bizarre metaphors, owing in no small part to a collective case of grand mal tunnel vision afflicting field’s biggest practitioners. One viable alternative to the only sometimes penetrable work of those for whom wine is all is, unsurprisingly, the work of one for whom wine is not all, or at least not quite all. Novelist Jay McInerney, best known for the transcription of yuppie nightmares that was Bright Lights, Big City, fits the bill just about as well as anyone.
    At least the editors of House & Garden think so; McInerney has penned the publication’s wine column for years. A Hedonist in the Cellar is the second collection of these pieces, a patchwork of tastings, comparisons, conversations with luminaries of the industry and visits to famed vineyards the world over. Though many wine journalists make a show of presenting themselves as straight-shooting outsiders, McInerney actually pulls off writing like one, taking the occasional shot at those who have imbibed the Kool-Aid of pretension. “One prominent critic,” he notes, “detects ‘stones, gravel and underlying minerals’ in a 2000 Nigl Riesling.” His coda: “Gravel is stone, dude.”
    Nevertheless, hand him the right bottle and McInerney invokes the implausible with the best of them. “I’m often baffled myself,” he admits, “when I read wine notes full of huckleberries and hawthorn blossoms. But give me a glass of Amarone and I’m the man! Step back, Bob Parker!” This is not to say that he keeps cheek perpetually free of tongue. He claims that a certain Bandol rosé “can smell like old sweaty saddle leather, dry-aged beef, and even wet fur,” helpfully adding that “I mean that as a compliment.” McInerney’s excitement gets the better of his quiet dignity every so often, a condition that allows him to use the word “turbocharged” no fewer than four times. In other instances, the straight, middle-aged author comes across as something between a teenage girl and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Ted Allen. One reaction to a fine meal and a rare champagne: “Risotto, white truffle, Salon. Oh. My. God.”
    Though all of this is informative and amusing, at no point does McInerney the wine critic emerge with as distinctive a voice as McInerney the novelist. Though there are nods to his primary career and the dubious reputation with which it has saddled him – “Ah, yes, the eighties,” he reflects. “Who can remember them?” – little else bleeds through. The short form he’s working with may be to blame: each subject receives no more than four pages, a good chunk of which is devoted to listing the relevant recommendations, which doesn’t make for smooth reading.
    A Hedonist in the Cellar’s collection is refreshingly pretension-free, at least by the low standards of wine journalism, though it’s too often stylistically undistinguished. One gets the impression that, freed of the constraints of the column, McInerney could produce something especially tasty for good-humored oenophiles with long attention spans. In the introduction, he acknowledges that wine is “an inexhaustible subject, a nexus of subjects, which leads us, if we choose to follow, into the realms of geology, botany, meteorology, history, aesthetics, and literature.” He understands that wonderful fact; next time, let’s hope he has the space to explore it.