At the Strangers' Gate

July 1, 2017
A longtime New Yorker contributor writes about his early years in the city--the 1980s principally--ruminating about art and artists, love and apartments, writing and reading and speaking, and the city that he loves.Gopnik--the author of numerous works on sundry subjects (The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, 2011, etc.)--returns with an affecting memoir about his many dawns: his love life (there is much here about Martha, his wife of many years), writing career, and friendships with significant figures such as Richard Avedon and Jeff Koons. This is a highly allusive text, with references ranging across the cultural landscape, from Anthony Trollope to X-Men, from Falstaff and Prince Hall to professor Irwin Corey. But Gopnik will engage most firmly those interested in the art world of the 1980s. He studied art history, worked as a docent at the Museum of Modern Art, and did his earliest publishing in art magazines. Later, he moved to GQ, where he wrote about men's fashion, then to Knopf as an editor before settling in at the New Yorker, his promised land. The text is also an extensive love letter to his wife--and includes a carefully erotic section about their sex life and about sex among married people in general. Throughout, readers will become aware of the author's great fortune in his career: meeting important people, acquiring jobs that even he knew he was not qualified for--e.g., Knopf and editing. However, Gopnik retains an appealing modesty throughout and has some very entertaining stories to tell, including one about an invasion of rats in their loft (some foul secrets of the city, he learns, lie below). Not exactly a Horatio Alger story but an engaging tale of a writer finding his way in work and life.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2017

In this memoir, New Yorker writer and essayist Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) looks back at his life in New York City in the 1980s through a series of lenses: his marriage to filmmaker Martha Parker, the apartments and neighborhoods in which they've lived, and the art and food they've experienced. As with many inhabitants of New York, real estate becomes a primary focus for the couple, and their living situations--from a tiny studio to a 1,500--square foot Soho loft--play an outsized role in the author's consciousness. Two chapters stand out as the most striking. The first captures "the experience of being adopted by a charismatic mentor," describing the couple's close relationship with fashion photographer Richard Avedon. The second depicts the changes brought to the burgeoning Soho neighborhood as it becomes the center of the art world. VERDICT As Gopnik writes, "art traps time," and with humor, affection, and the careful eye of a trained art historian, he offers an enjoyable and engaging story of New York at a very specific moment in history.--Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 14, 2017
Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) moves masterfully between humorous, poignant minutiae of private experience and a macro view of New York City throughout the 1980s. Starting with his wide-eyed move to the city at the start of the decade, Gopnik makes readers feel like Manhattan insiders as he shares stories of how he and his wife moved through low-rent apartments and a parade of quirky jobs, friends, and experiences, culminating in his plum gig writing for the New Yorker. Gopnik is especially adept at writing about episodes both dynamic (a writer’s joy at seeing his words in print, or frantically helping a neighbor stop a damaging leak) and disappointing (the drudgery of being an art reference librarian) as he integrates into some of the Big Apple’s most famous cultural institutions. The Museum of Modern Art, the booming SoHo art scene, and book publishing all serve as sources of his wonder. No matter what the topic, however, whether it is married love, the meaning of physical space (he describes the city’s “basement flats that look out on an airshaft”), or the growing greed surrounding him, Gopnik’s greatest gift
is his playful insight (“Tenderness toward one’s lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one’s lost longings is just life”).

Starred review from August 1, 2017
When Gopnik (The Table Comes First, 2011), an award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author, arrived in New York with the love of his life in 1980, he was all set to earn a graduate degree in art history and write wry essays and witty lyrics a la Gershwin. His academic and creative dreams collided, inevitably, with fiscal realities, setting up a classic template for a how I survived and succeeded memoir. But Gopnik takes it further. By virtue of his exceptional observational and analytical powers, acute emotional and moral exactitude, and charmingly rueful sense of humor, he turns in a riveting and incandescent chronicle of personal evolution vividly set within the ever-morphing, cocaine-stoked crucible of ferocious ambition that was 1980s Manhattan. He tells tales of the forging of a marriage; of nightmarish apartment battles with verminous hordes; of fortuitous jobs at museums, men's fashion magazines, and a book publisher; and of bonds developed with critic Robert Hughes, artist Jeff Koons, and, most profoundly, photographer Richard Avedon. Arabesque, captivating, self-deprecating, and affecting, Gopnik's cultural and intimate reflections, in league with those of Alfred Kazin and Joan Didion, are rich in surprising moments and delving perceptions into chance, creativity, character, style, conviction, hard work, and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)