Smugged by Reality
by James Wolcott Post date 02.02.07
Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York By Adam Gopnik (Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pp., $25)
[...]
After extracting as much good copy as contemporary Paris had to offer, Gopnik and family--wife Martha, son Luke, and daughter Olivia--returned to New York in 2000 to "make a home here for good," free of French exactitude. The Children's Gate was their port of entry. "The Children's Gate exists, and you really can go through it. It's the name for the entrance to Central Park at Seventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.... Now my family had, in a way, decided to pass through as children, too." In the family unit's absence from New York, the patter of little feet had become thundering hooves. "[By] the time we came home, the city had been repopulated--some would say overrun--with children. It was now the drug addicts and transvestites and artists who were left muttering about the undesirable, short element taking over the neighborhood. New York had become, almost comically, a children's city again, with kiddie-coiffure joints where sex shops had once stood and bare, ruined singles bars turned into play-and-party centers." Convoys of baby strollers cruised sidewalks once crunchy with crack vials, and the Times Square where Travis Bickle hunched his shoulders in the steam-risen satanic night was now a diorama of Disney favorites.
There are those who will decry the loss of that old bedlam spirit, as lowrent creative funk is flushed out by high-priced emporia and homogenized chain stores (goodbye CBGB, hello Duane Reade), but there is no disputing that Manhattan is a safer, cleaner, nicer, more hospitable city than the hellhole of shock-horror New York Post headlines of yore (such as the immortal "Headless Body in Topless Bar"). As Gopnik puts it, "it is hard to compare the Mad Max blackout of '77 with the Romper Room blackout of '03 and insist that something has gone so terribly wrong with the city." Certainly it's preferable to raise children in a city where stray whizzing bullets are at a minimum and the dead don't rise after dusk. Is it needless to add, though, that the urban arcadia in which Gopnik exults is almost exclusively the preserve of an affluent, mostly white cultural elite able to afford private-school tuitions and trips abroad? I don't mean to get political or anything, but I don't see the Hispanic and black parents in my neighborhood shuttling their kids to "kiddie-coiffure joints." Gopnik tends to universalize his impressions, to generalize from his insulation.
"There's no bad place to watch children grow [Beirut, Rwanda, Baghdad?], but Manhattan is a good one," he writes. Good? Why, it's the best! "Ah, the children, the children!" he exclaims. "Has any place ever been better contoured to them than Manhattan is now? We take them out on fall Saturday mornings--Paul Desmond saxophone mornings, as I think of them, lilting jazz sounds almost audible in the avenues--to go to the Whitney or the park to look dutifully at what remains of the avant-garde in Chelsea, or to shop at Fairway, a perfect place, more moving than any Parisian market in its openness, its joy, a place where they have cheap soap lets you taste of six different olive oils [sic]." This bountiful note of yuppie triumphalism warbles through the book--of the label "yuppie" itself, Gopnik gloats, "We were called that, derisively, before the world was ours"--as the pride and pleasure that he and his co-evals take in their exalted taste buds and their little geniuses reflect flatteringly on their own achievements, material sense of wellbeing, and immersion in the vital, fizzing stream of urban resplendence.
full: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070212&s=wolcott021207 (reg. req.)
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam