At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New
York
Adam Gopnik (2017, Vintage Books)
In 1980, Adam Gopnik and his
soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left Montreal for the brighter lights of New
York. They were just kids when they arrived, twenty and eighteen, and
they moved into an absurd apartment, a nine-by-eleven basement studio
on East Eighty-seventh Street. “We were so enraptured with the idea
of our escaping and intertwining that everything unappealing about
the place was transposed into the key of irresistible.”
That is to say, it was an optimistic
time. Martha was studying film-making at Columbia, and Adam was
starting art-history graduate school, though his ambitions also
including writing for magazines and composing for Broadway.
Everything seemed possible. “If your faith is in life's poetry, as
ours was, a tiny room inadequate by any human standard and designed
to make life borderline impossible looks appealing. The less possible
it becomes, the more beautiful the illusion looks.”
Gopnik says (and, being his age, I
agree) “Forty years is the natural gestation time of nostalgia,
the interval it takes for a past period to become a lost time, and,
sometimes, a golden age.” We don't really feel that way about the
eighties, especially in New York, where the brassiness of the gold
rush has left an unpleasant stain, to this day, on our economic
lives. “Today the young live less absurd lives, but have more
chastened ambitions. Adequacy seems, bitterly, enough.”
Forty years ago, sweetly,
fake-Scandinavian ice cream was new. “The apartments got smaller
and the ice cream got fattier. Eating premium ice cream in a tiny
space with roaches was almost the same as living in a reasonable
amount of room.” By the same token, lunchtime talks about the
pictures at the Museum of Modern Art for fifty dollars a time seemed
like a fair start in the working world. “In the eighties, fluidity
of opportunity made up for absurdity of occupation. You did a silly
job, but having jobs was not in itself silly–one led to a better
one.”
In Gopnik's case, that meant becoming
the fashion copyeditor at Gentlemen's Quarterly, though he was
singularly unqualified on nearly all counts. Martha had all the
fashion sense in the family, and all the eye for detail. What Adam
had was a way with words. “...I pounded out, with ever-increasing
confidence, rules and diktats and nonnegotiable dogmas on grooming.”
Really, what was there to say? “Perhaps the truth is that fashion
can only be diktats, and our respect for fashion is our secret
respect for the necessity of an arbitrary principle in life.”
With a newly full-time salary, the
Gopniks made a giant leap upward, into SoHo. Against all odds, they
found a fifteen hundred square foot loft space in the middle of an
urban village where the work of art making occurred behind every
historic cast-iron facade. (The upstairs neighbor worked in straw,
dead fish having proved impractical.) As an art historian and critic,
Gopnik was at the center of the known world, though I freely confess
that I have to take his word for the value and meaning of the various
works on offer.
Job led on to job, editing fiction for
GQ and then for Knopf, and eventually writing at The New
Yorker, all before the age of twenty-seven; it would seem magical
if you didn't know about all the work behind it. In the case of The
New Yorker, the work was to walk around, to look and listen. He
cultivated the legendary Joseph Mitchell, who put him onto what he
calls the secret of good writing: “a wild exactitude.” Gopnik
says, “Flat descriptive sentences describing an absurdly vivid
character, simple inventories of impossible objects–that was the
end! Good stories were strange stories told straight.”
It's likely that this book will mean
more to you if you ever saw New York in the eighties, but if not,
don't let that stop you. Gopnik's wild exactitude is always worth the
price of admission.
Email edition September 1, 2019
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