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.
Gopnik knows how to turn on the charm, as he does in a well-practiced yarn about losing the bottom half of his one fine suit. Also endearing is his paean to his wife: champion sleeper to his insomniac, meticulous fashionista to his haphazard dresser — although his attempt to write about happily married sex is flat-out awkward ... Gopnik doesn’t always show himself in the most flattering light. He acknowledges his driving ambition even as he describes relationships with 'Dick' Avedon, Robert Hughes and other steppingstone mentors that carry whiffs of sycophancy. In his determination to capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s in art, food, publishing and fashion, his smart observations are sometimes undercut by pontifications: 'Art traps time. It just does.' But more baffling is his repeated insistence that writers must find the 'one right order' in which to arrange their words. Really? Aren’t there as many ways to tell a story as there are to paint a picture?
Gopnik knows full well that the unholy alliance between art and commerce, which emerged in the ’80s, has contributed mightily to the horrifying money culture that has led us to where we are today, but he finds merit in the scene as a whole. In fact, he loves it. Which perhaps accounts for the occasional glibness in this book that I, for one, found either silly or startling or offensive ... What we have here is the story of a pair of privileged young adults who suffer neither intellectual disappointment nor spiritual disillusion nor emotional setbacks: everything that is required for a person to mature. As they are at the beginning, so Adam and Martha are at the end. Consequently, what is missing from At the Strangers’ Gate is a sense of progress toward self-discovery: the very essence of any memoir that hopes to achieve lasting value.
Occasionally, Gopnik’s love for the epigram trips the reader up: 'Art traps time, but food traps manners. The art lasts, the food rots.' This is his introduction into a recollection of not only his life in SoHo but also his fledgling professional art criticism and gradual breakthrough into the literary universe. At the Strangers’ Gate is a book studded with nuggets of fine prose, best tasted in smaller sections.
Gopnik is not insulating himself so much as he is protecting himself. And his latest memoir, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York, shows how that attitude first came into play ...an important book for understanding both Gopnik the Man and Gopnik the Writer ...in standard Gopnik style, a memoir with a near-universal narrative; but it is also about how that experience allowed him to access — and to explain — meaning in high culture ...also a critical analysis of critical analysis ... Gopnik’s cultural criticism is a weapon against domination and against drudgery; and, if he seems pretentious because he focuses almost exclusively on highbrow culture, one need only look at how refinement better stakes itself as authoritarianism’s enemy.
Throughout the book, Gopnik is torn between his desire to self-deprecatingly proclaim '[m]y inadequacy as hero of the city or even the story' and his need to spotlight the hip social circles he moves in, name-dropping along the way artists David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Jeff Koons, as well as the art critic Robert Hughes, in addition to the aforementioned Avedon and Varnedoe. The unstated implication is that these important, interesting people sense the special qualities of our modest nonhero. Gopnik describes himself on more than one occasion as a simple storyteller whose only gift is for 'spinning tales,' but simple stories are greatly outnumbered by blustery aphorisms ... If only he could relax and trust his keen eye for character and atmosphere.
...a well-oiled and smoothly captivating performance from start to finish, sure to be as beloved as Paris to the Moon but feeling even more personal and involving ... It's a memoir that contains not a few cautions about writing, reading, or believing memoirs, which is a rhetorical judo move only a writer of Gopnik's skill could perform ... The writer's job, he tells his readers, is to find right words, even beautiful words. In this he himself certainly succeeds. At the Strangers' Gate brings a whole decade vividly back to life.
Gopnik craftily presents his conquest of New York, or of the New Yorker, as a series of happy accidents … Despite his fluency, Gopnik claims to find writing a sad and lonely business. Much of his book is addressed adoringly to his wife, Martha, who, mostly asleep while he tosses in insomniac misery beside her, does not respond to his endearments: are all writers unrequited lovers? … A sentence, he suggests, need not be a penal term: it can set you free instead of imprisoning you. Performed by him, such verbal flourishes are both witty and wise. Gopnik is a sleek stylist, and a high-minded, big-hearted moralist into the bargain.
In At the Strangers’ Gate, Gopnik — a superb prose stylist who has won three National Magazine Awards — looks back at the 1980s, his first decade in New York City ...has some easily spotted imperfections. Anyone who’s ever read his New Yorker pieces knows that Gopnik is at once extremely skillful and somewhat vain. It’s apparent that he enjoys the sound of his own sentences, and sometimes, he seems more concerned about the handsomeness of his prose than the logic of his arguments ...beautifully written nonsense ... Happily, Gopnik has enough good stories to carry the day. Which brings us back to his chats with Joseph Mitchell.
His new book is nominally a memoir of his first years in Manhattan, where he arrived from Montreal early in the venal 1980s, but its reminiscences are the pretext for a series of dizzy riffs...there are essays on fashion as evidence for Nietzsche’s philosophy of the eternal return, on the hidden economic logic in the layout of department stores, on the semiotics of Häagen-Dazs ice-cream with its 'meaningless pseudo-Danish name,' and on the symbiotic relation between the Sony Walkman and Nike sneakers... Listening to the voices of others relieves the pressure: his book makes room for monologues delivered by a series of eccentric acquaintances... These garrulous surrogates rescue Gopnik from solitude, and also help him outgrow the contrariness of the art critic ... Performed by him, such verbal flourishes are both witty and wise. Gopnik is a sleek stylist, and a high-minded, big-hearted moralist into the bargain.
...Adam Gopnik’s At the Strangers’ Gate will serve as a refreshing corrective ...the 11 loosely connected essays that compose the book display the polymath Gopnik’s breadth of knowledge, graceful prose and a self-deprecating wit that makes it easy to identify with the young couple as they take the first tentative steps toward maturity in their adopted city ... If there’s any weakness in At the Strangers’ Gate, unfortunately, it’s the book’s longest piece, 'SoHo, 1983' ... Readers who aren’t familiar with the minutiae of debates that roiled the art world during this era may find their attention wandering...possesses a gift for making New York’s neighborhoods come alive... Gopnik doesn’t try to glamorize the first decade he and Martha spent in New York City, but it’s impossible to read this appealing book without appreciating it as the opening chapter of a love affair with a place.
...an affecting memoir about his many dawns ... 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.
Gopnik moves masterfully between humorous, poignant minutiae of private experience and a macro view of New York City throughout the 1980s ... 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 ... No matter what the topic, however, whether it is married love, the meaning of physical space, or the growing greed surrounding him, Gopnik’s greatest gift is his playful insight.
