At the Strangers' Gate

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