Through the Children\'s Gate Secret

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York recounts the author's return to New York City after years of living in Paris. The book contains Gopnik's quirky observations of everyday life in New York, including its architecture. The title refers to the children's gate of Central Park but also to how Gopnik is seeing the city anew through the eyes of his children. The extent to which being a New Yorker is hard-wired into your DNA from birth is dramatically illustrated through Gopnik's children Olivia and Luke. Yet Gopnik also suggests that to be a New Yorker is to be a perpetual child, always in love with the size and the wonder of the city.

In one essay entitled "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli," Gopnik details how even children in New York are so over-scheduled that his daughter's imaginary friend seldom has time to play with her. Charley Ravioli barely has time to talk to Olivia on the phone. "He canceled lunch -- again," she sighs (Gopnik 157). Olivia's personality highlights many of the paradoxes of New York City childhood. On one hand, Olivia has a precociously large vocabulary (at least in Gopnik's presentation of her) and seems very sophisticated in her expression of her wants and needs. On the other hand, the drama that ensues over the death of a pet store fish has an absurdly heightened and tragic nature. While this is the humor of the piece, it also highlights the degree to which New Yorkers are insulated from 'natural' things like grass, dogs, and larger animals, except in the narrow confines of areas like Central Park.

This combination of world-weariness and awe is also seen in Gopnik's presentation of the city itself. "I can walk if I want to the Guggenheim if I want to, these days, but in my mind it has become a place to go when the coffee shops are too full," he writes, as if the art museum full of treasures is meaningless to him, other than a diversion (Gopnik 6). Yet he also writes that he is perpetually surprised by new sights -- an unexpected statue on one corner, a historical landmark he has never seen before -- and sometimes even ordinary office buildings strike him like they have a "soulful checkerboard pattern -- this one working late, this one gone home" (Gopnik 105).

However, before a reader extrapolates too much about New York city from Gopnik's writings, it is important to note that Gopnik's frequent use of metaphors and similes shows that he is very much a 'writer' at work, presenting his personal perspective, not a journalist. This is a very personal and idiosyncratic version of New York, and his prose is heavily stylized. There is also something suspicious in the degree to which his children speak in perfect, adult sentences and the extent to which he can easily extrapolate their motivations and thought patterns from his observations. The frequent use of recounted dialogue and elaborate descriptions bestows a novelistic quality to his essays, which makes them interesting and compelling reading, but does not 'feel' very realistic.