Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York [Hardcover]

Adam Gopnik (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 10, 2006

Following the best-selling Paris to the Moon, the continuation of the Gopniks’ adventures against the panorama of a different though no less storied city as they attempt to make a new home for themselves.

Autumn 2000: After five years in Paris, Adam Gopnik moves his family back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here in the wondrously strange “neighborhood” of Manhattan we observe the triumphs and travails of father, mother, son, and daughter; and of the teachers, coaches, therapists, adversaries, and friends who round out the extended urban family. From Bluie, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, the Gopniks’ new home is under the spell of the sort of characters only the city’s unique civilization of childhood could produce.

Not long after their return, the fabric of living will be rent by the events of 9/11, but like a magic garment will reweave itself, reviving normalcy in a world where Jewish jokes mingle with debates about the problem of consciousness, the price of real estate, and the meaning of modern art. Along the way, the impermanence and transcendence of life will be embodied in the person of a beloved teacher and coach who, even facing death, radiates a distinctively local light.

Written with Gopnik’s signature mix of mind and heart, elegant and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life, Through the Children’s Gate is a chronicle, by turns tender and hilarious, of a family taking root in the unlikeliest patch of earth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Back from living in Paris with his wife and two kids, as chronicled charmingly in Paris to the Moon, Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, records in his tidy, writerly and obsessive fashion his family's relocation to the city of his earliest professional aspiration: New York. No longer the grim, decrepit hell of the 1970s, New York of the new century has become a children's city, infused by a "new paternal feeling," and doting father Gopnik is delighted to walk through the Children's Gate of Central Park to relive the romance of childhood. His 20 various essays meander over topics dear to the hearts of New York parents, such as learning to be appropriately Jewish ("A Purim Story"); working with the ad hoc committee called Artists and Anglers at his son's hypercaring private school, on methods of flight for the production of Peter Pan; and his four-year-old daughter's imaginary playmate, Charlie Ravioli, who is simply too booked to play with her. The less structured series of essays on Thanksgiving are most pleasing and read like diaries, ranging from the rage over noise to the safety of riding buses. Gopnik conveys in his mannered, occasionally gilded prose that New York still represents a kind of childlike hope—"for something big to happen." 150,000 copy first printing. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Gopnik's previous book, the best-selling Paris to the Moon (2000), drew its material in large part from his "Paris Journal" column appearing in the New Yorker. That book shared his and his family's experiences living in the City of Light for five years. In 2000 he and they moved back to New York, and in his new collection of essays, he demonstrates anew how, despite tackling two of the world's greatest and oft-written-about cities, he has staked out his own mastery of the literature of place. As Gopnik ranges over contemporary life in the Big Apple, bringing into his purview and commentary such specific topics as raising children in that vastly busy environment and indulging in one of the city's favorite preoccupations (namely, consulting a psychotherapist), he lets there be no mistake that these pieces are literate, serious in his analysis of social issues (even though he can be funny at the same time), deeply thought out and well reasoned, and arise from not only an immaculate writerly talent but also a sharp ability to understand why people, in particular places, do peculiar things. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400041813
• ISBN-13: 978-1400041817
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,082,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > Travel > United States > New York > New York City

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Through Gopnik's Gate...New York seen magnificently through a writer's lens February 1, 2007

By Saul Hymes

Format:Hardcover

I should preface this review with some background: I am a pediatrician, working and living in New York, and this book first caught my eye just from the title. When I read the jacket liner and discovered it was, at least in part, about raising children in New York, I felt I had to give it a whirl. I was not too familiar with Gopnik's essays in The New Yorker, though his name was familiar to me and his writing had been recommended to me many times. It was with this background sense of his work that I began to read.

And read, I did. From the first moment I picked up this book I was engulfed and enthralled. This book is a collection of essays written from the author's perspective. He had lived in Paris for 5 years on assignment for The New Yorker Magazine, and returned to New York City in 2000 primarily out of homesickness and out of a desire to raise his family there. Gopnik knows New York, but a lot had changed since the last time he lived here, and this collection of essays is really about his rediscovery of the city, through his own eyes as well as those of others: his children, most notably, but also his wife and some of his close friends. His essays, which feel at times more like stories, are of course tempered by and work through the enormity of 9/11. And the New York he describes is as much the New York of and around 9/11 as it is the New York that it always has been and yet also a new city formed by nothing other than the march of progress.

His subject matter is of two parts, both close to my own heart--New York city and children. He does them both such amazing justice in this book.

Gopnik's prose is a joy to behold, both familiar and formal, intricately planned yet at times stream-of-consciousness in style. His skill as a writer is as much in this, his technical mastery of the genre, as it is in his easy ability to depict emotions ranging from humor to pathos succintly yet poignantly. His skills suit his subjects perfectly. The city crackles to life underneath his pen, as he captures in amazing clarity what it is like to sit awake and look out at the windows around the city at 3 AM, or what it felt like to watch the city burn 5 1/2 years ago, or what central park means to the city and those in it. He is the quintessential New Yorker, and yet, perhaps because he left the city, he is able now to see it so much more clearly without taking it for granted as the rest of us do.

But the real heart of this book lies in his portrayal of his children. Through his writing we see his love for Olivia and Luke leap off of the page and, without being overly trite, right into our hearts. The way he describes himself already preparing for when they leave home...the way he opines on what the earth must feel like when zen masters leave it--his children are his life, and it shows brilliantly. As someone without children of my own, but who works with them on a daily basis, I can attest to the accuracy with which Gopnik captures their idiosyncracies while still making painfully clear how alike they truly are. By the end of this book, the reader feels he or she knows Gopnik, his family, his children, and the reader feels for him. Or at least I did.

This is, once again, a wonderful read. Light, funny, and yet undeniably heavy and full of rich sadness and depth, and at times all at once. Gopnik has outdone himself. As we step through the Children's Gate, we enter his world, and when the book ends we just don't want to leave.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A rich offering of Gopnik's graceful and allusive prose November 21, 2006

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Readers of The New Yorker who relish each issue that contains an Adam Gopnik essay will be delighted that 20 of them have been collected in this rich offering of his work. Those unacquainted with Gopnik's graceful and allusive prose are likely to become instant fans.

Taking its title from the name of the Central Park entrance at Seventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, the collection is unified by Gopnik's captivating insights into the lives of his precocious children, Luke and Olivia, as they adapt to life in their new home. That focus is apt, for, he observes, about the Upper West Side world into which they settle, comfortably but not entirely without unease, "a constant obsessive-compulsive anxiety about children --- their health, their future, the holes in their socks, and the fraying of their psyches --- is taken entirely for granted here."

In September 2000 Gopnik and his family returned to New York, after five years in Paris that provided the material for his acclaimed book PARIS TO THE MOON. In that time, he notes, "The map of the city we carried just five years ago hardly corresponds to the city we know today, while the New Yorks we knew before that are buried completely." That first autumn is portrayed as an idyllic time, its innocence made more poignant when viewed backwards through the lens of 9/11.

Two of the pieces, "The City and the Pillars" and "Urban Renewal," deal explicitly with the events of that day and its aftermath, but the fear and anxiety it engendered shadow much of Gopnik's narrative. In a characteristically arresting metaphor that captures the profound and yet curious effect the terrorist attacks had on the city, he notes, "It's as though the sinking of the Titanic had taken place right beside a subway station and been watched by a frightened or curious crowd who saw something unbelievable, the great ship listing and rising up and breaking in two and the people falling from the funnel, and then walked home from the disaster and showed their families that their hands were still cold from touching the iceberg." Yet despite the disaster, Gopnik writes, New Yorkers "learned to live on one foot, hopping along spiritually in more or less normal times." Again, he returns to his theme of children and families: "The real question that pressed itself upon us as parents was how to let our children live in joy in a time of fear, how to give light enough to live in when what we saw were so many shadows."

The New York life Gopnik sketches in these essays is anything but unremittingly anxious or bleak. There are numerous moments of sly humor that leaven the more serious essays. Readers will chuckle as Gopnik, at best a casually observant Jew, grapples with the task of crafting a presentation about the Jewish holiday of Purim. His description of the unintended consequences of a "no-screen" weekend, as he and another father try to wean their sons from computers and video games, is hilarious. And few readers will be able to stifle the urge to "LOL" as fortysomething Gopnik is initiated by his son into the world of instant messaging.

Gopnik also proves himself an erudite companion as he discourses on such subjects as the decline of the New York department store, the revival of Times Square and the story behind the Bill Evans Trio jazz classic, "Sunday at the Village Vanguard." While the collection is decidedly Manhattan-centric, he does leave the island briefly to introduce readers to the bizarre phenomenon of the wild parrots of Flatbush.

Not every essay in the book hits the mark. "The Cooking Game," a description of a contest in which several prominent chefs prepare a meal with ingredients selected by Gopnik, suffers from an uncharacteristically narrow focus. "Death of a Fish" treads perilously close to the line of undue sentimentality. Yet these minor stumbles are more than offset by "Last of the Metrozoids," the understated and moving account of the death of Kirk Varnedoe, Gopnik's close friend and a noted art historian, as he delivers his final lectures and coaches, painstakingly and lovingly, Luke and his eight-year-old teammates on the Giant Metrozoids football team.

Like all accomplished essayists, Adam Gopnik excels in moving seamlessly from the particular to the universal and back again. New York is too multifaceted a place to be captured in any single work, but THROUGH THE CHILDREN'S GATE is a generous and warmhearted place to start.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars don't miss it November 3, 2006

By dave

Format:Hardcover

Reading the preceding review reminds me that our society is full of disturbed people, the kind who wait around for books they expect not to like (get a life, pal). Perhaps these are also the folks preying upon our children; I don't know haven't checked the local police registry. As a father of two, I was really moved by Adam Gopnik stories of raising his kids in New York, trying to fullfill the dream that brings so many people to that amazing city while still pulling off the commonplace miracle of child-rearing. What struck me most--I was born in the rural midwest but married a NYC gal and lived there for two years before heading for its suburbs to raise my brood--what struck me most is how much raising kids in New York is just like raising them anywhere else, oddly enough. There are some strange peripheral realities, toddlers with cellphones, playing ball in the most famous park in the world, but the emotions are universal and this is what Gopnik captures with priceless wit and warmth and eloquence. Troubled indeed is the heart that isn't moved by the spectacle he evokes. The most purely pleasurable book I've read this year. As an ordained minister, I'm recommending it to my congregation. Family values with great entertainment value to boot.