Gopnik...isn’t the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach ... Gopnik is aware that this is a tired approach for memoir-slash-ideas books such as this one ... But it works for him because—and here the book serves as a demonstration of one of its themes—it’s a pleasure to spend time in the presence of someone who’s mastered their craft ... Gopnik never claims that he’s going to crack the code of mastery decisively, so it’s no criticism to say that in this wise, companionable, and often extremely funny book he never does.
The book I was expecting was something closer to a confessional memoir: a critic at the height of an illustrious career finally admitting which of his assumptions and judgments had been wrong ... Now, such a confession does shadow The Real Work and in fact may be its secret subject. But its explicit subject is more wayward and more ordinarily charming: how it might be possible to derive a general formula for mastery from a series of learning scenarios ... The result is a digressive, improvised collage of seemingly unrelated forms of expertise, and some of its pleasures are Gopnik’s excursions into professional jargon — he takes his title from magicians’ shoptalk — and techniques ... The book’s final axiom is its most profound, all the more so for also being unexpected ... The Real Work may not seem like a critic’s book about art, but its conclusion hints at a way of resolving the apparent tension between critics and artists. After all, each needs the other — in the moment of performance.
That phrase, 'the real work,' comes from Gopnik’s fascinating glimpse into the world of magic, a trade in which the normal obscurities of skill acquisition are rendered even more opaque ... Works in this book, a lot of the time, because of the fluidity and incision of his prose, his ranging interest and knowledge, his capacity for deploying profound koans with casual verve.
