Licked

Updike's aging protagonists boink on

by William Corbett

PARIS TO THE MOON. By Adam Gopnik. Random House, 338 pages, $24.95.

A dozen pages into Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon I set this collection of essays aside, put off by the patrician modesty of its tone. It is a tone that will be familiar to readers of the New Yorker, where, as the prefatory note explains, "much of the contents of this book was originally published." It is a tone whose master was E.B. White, and it has a Gary Cooperish shoe-scraping aw-shucks modesty -- modesty that winks at the reader. You can hear it in the sentence "These stories are also, willy-nilly, about bringing up a kid in foreign parts in a funny time." Like Dorothy Parker's use of the "Constant Reader," it is a tone that makes me -- no reason to be cute about it -- barf. Thus I thought to go no farther into Gopnik's book and to spare you this notice.

Then I picked up a copy of the New York Times and found a large advertisement for Paris to the Moon that reprinted in full a rave review that had appeared in the Sunday Times -- a rave by a Frenchman, no less. Thinking I might have been too hasty, I returned to the book and read it straight through. Either the modest tone lifts or I got used to it. Gopnik does write clearly and with verve, and he is intelligent, if also predictable. And the City of Light is a subject on which Americans have an enduring crush.

Paris to the Moon offers two types of essay: familiar and journalistic. The familiar ones take for their theme a young American family in Paris. The journalistic ones, for example Gopnik's reports on the trial of Maurice Papon (a figure in the Vichy government) and on the "crisis" in French cooking, hardly mention the family. Gopnik is, I suppose, a good reporter, but it's hard for this reader to judge. Was there really a crisis in French cooking? The evidence is, with the exception of a single survey, anecdotal. He does not convince me, but he does present in this essay, and elsewhere, the views of his friend Professor Eugenio Donato. The professor theorizes that French cooking came not from the bottom (the peasant's simmering stewpot) up, but from the top (great Parisian chefs like Escoffier) down. These chefs wrote the cookbooks as if, according to Donato, they were passing on a national tradition. They were, in fact, creating that tradition. Interesting.

In his introductory essay, Gopnik writes that his "stories are . . . about the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." This is an accurate description: Paris to the Moon is a handsomely designed and produced book that is full of fluff. I think Random House is aware of this. Why else would the writer of the book's jacket copy have described Gopnik's "Paris Journals" as "beloved?" Beloved by whom? Not by any of the New Yorker readers I know -- not one has ever mentioned Gopnik or his journals in my hearing. I know my acquaintances hardly add up to a focus group, and I know that jacket copy is a place for puffery, but the New Yorker was once above this sort of thing.

I am thinking of the premier (in my opinion) New Yorker stylist and the virtual inventor of New Yorker city reporting, Joseph Mitchell, and of A.J. Liebling and John McPhee, and of the magazine that published James Baldwin and Rachel Carson. Gopnik's work is, for all its surface brightness and dash, another step in the New Yorker's decline. It's not as sad and tawdry as Lillian Roth's self-serving memoir of William Shawn, or as cold and ruthless as Renata Adler's equally self-serving and score-settling Gone, a pimp slap of an obituary for the magazine. Rather, the Paris to the Moon essays are like those "advertorial" features that take up space. Gopnik's Paris is where all good literate sophisticates go to show off their culture. American writers have been doing this for years. For all the beauty of his prose, Hemingway could not keep from letting his readers know that he was in the know. Still, his Paris -- I'm thinking of A Moveable Feast -- has the stamp of individual seeing and feeling. Gopnik's Paris feels as if it were being encountered at a distance, the distancing factor being a style whose charm is too calculated and self-conscious. A style that does not give the reader the intimacy with Paris that's necessary for this book succeed.