Is this real life? Adam Gopnik’s bohemian rhapsody
Adam Gopnik has reached the age of reminiscence.
“At the Strangers’ Gate,” much of which originated as stories for the Moth, is essentially a prequel to his memoirs “Paris to the Moon” (2000) and “Through the Children’s Gate” (2006). The story of his early years in New York City in the 1980s, it is at once self-deprecating and self-celebrating.
Fresh out of college, Gopnik and his soon-to-be wife, Martha, arrived from Montreal to a city increasingly “ruled by brutal materialism.” He had a graduate fellowship to study art history; she was intent on becoming a documentary film editor.
With more taste than money, they rented a basement studio apartment on the Upper East Side, “a romantic shoebox.” They called it the Blue Room, after a Rodgers and Hart song, and poured their hearts and wallets into making it beautiful. They made do with affordable luxuries such as premium ice cream and windowshopping at Bloomingdale’s until they could buy lavish meals and clothes they coveted.
Every couple has its origin story, which usually involves early financial hardship shrouded in a haze of nostalgia for simpler times. Gopnik taps into this, along with that urban perennial: real-estate horror stories. But he also revisits the joy of making the rounds of Soho art galleries Saturday mornings and the unmatched elation of early career successes.
Gopnik knows how to turn on the charm, as he does in a well-practised yarn about losing the bottom half of his one fine suit. Also endearing is his paean to his wife: champion sleeper to his insomniac, meticulous fashionista to his haphazard dresser — although his attempt to write about happily married sex is flat-out awkward.
To supplement his stipend, Gopnik took a series of part-time jobs. He found he was best suited for the one that paid the least: giving lunchtime gallery talks at MoMA. He learned that he was better at spinning tales than at writing academic papers. During a stint at GQ magazine, he discovered a knack for glib copy. By 1986, he figured out how to combine his talents and has been singing for his supper ever since, mainly in print for The New Yorker, but increasingly in live performances.
While living in a rat-infested loft in SoHo’s Cast Iron Historic District, he moonlighted as an art critic, struggling to articulate the tensions that came with the commodification of art. This long chapter — inflated, rather like Jeff Koons’s balloon sculptures and their soaring prices — exemplifies Gopnik’s fascination with combining high and low culture, and juxtaposing the personal with the societal.
Gopnik doesn’t always show himself in the most flattering light. He acknowledges his driving ambition even as he describes relationships with “Dick” Avedon, Robert Hughes and other stepping-stone mentors that carry whiffs of sycophancy. In his determination to capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s in art, food, publishing and fashion, his smart observations are sometimes undercut by pontifications: “Art traps time. It just does.”
But more baffling is his repeated insistence that writers must find the “one right order” in which to arrange their words. Really? Aren’t there as many ways to tell a story as there are to paint a picture?