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.
Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human ... Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth; the roughly established number of heartbeats we are given to achieve whatever means most to us.
What makes Gopnik’s account so powerful for educators is that he’s seemingly not thinking about us at all. He’s caught up in the real work, and there is reverie there ... Gopnik is rapturous talking about real mastery, but as a student in the various fields he explores, he himself muddles along ... [A] real gift.
Through observation and deduction, Gopnik grasps much about the meaning of mastery, its many sides, requirement of extensive practice, invention, and intuition, how it happens via a series of small steps, and flow. Gopnik’s unusual analysis of expertise and accomplishment includes his own charming moments and can-do attitude.
Masterful ... He demonstrates that regardless of our level of talent and ability, as human beings of parts, we need not be hindered by our limitations but can be goaded by them. The real work is within our capacities. Gopnik’s intelligence gleams on nearly every page, though he occasionally gets a little overly academic for a general audience. Yet, like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling. In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling.
