Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

I am not the guy you go to for deep explication of a generation-old #1 bestseller. (I'm frankly not the guy you, or anyone, goes to for anything: I'm some random blogger still typing things out a good ten years after the form withered and the things that made me vaguely interesting or relevant faded into the background. But leave that part aside; even at what I would laughably call my peak, no one would care what I said about Adam Gopnik.)

I found Paris to the Moon in a library sale a decade ago, ten years after it was huge. I read it this year, after taking it off the shelf a bunch of times in the intervening years to look at it. Bottom line: it's well-written and thoughtful, but one of those books that tries to obscure how miscellaneous it is, and also is a generation-old at this point.

Gopnik was a feature writer for The New Yorker - still is, but was in the mid-90s - and he and his wife Martha had been talking about living in Paris for a while. They'd just had their first child, a boy Lucas, and realized this was the last moment such a move would be relatively easy. They both had creative-class work that could be done anywhere, and the New Yorker had a history of having random writers report back from Paris and, luckily, no one in that role at the moment. So they did it.

They stayed there for about five years, roughly 1995-1999, and I gather Gopnik continued to write about his family after the return to New York City, producing a book I may have to look for eventually. But this is the full chronicle of this period of their lives: what he produced, journalistically, during that stint in Paris.

Paris to the Moon collects what seems to be eighteen New Yorker pieces, probably somewhat edited - with an additional new piece, somewhat shorter, as an introduction - and four longer "Christmas Journal" pieces that each sums up a year and which may not have been previously published. They are placed in what seems to be chronological order (at least of publication; some cover periods of time that overlap), and, as I said above, are pretty miscellaneous: the through-line is their family life, especially Lucas's growing up from an infant to a small boy, but most of the pieces are one-offs either personal or let-me-tell-you-about-this-thing-in-France.

Gopnik is thoughtful, interesting, and very quotable:

One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and taking the air and walking their small, indifferent dogs along with everybody else.

 - "The Chill," p.73

Some of the pieces in here are more ephemeral than others - the epic two-part story of how Gopnik and a large number of other journalistic and publishing people failed to affect, in any serious way, the takeover of their favorite brasserie by a restaurant mogul is probably the height of the "amusing to read, absolutely meaningless twenty years later" aspect of the book.

But some, as with an article about a major, and very late, war-crimes trial coming out of WWII, are perhaps equally relevant today, and Gopnik just as quotable:

To deliver a child to the secret police is as large a crime against humanity as you ever need to find, no matter where you think he is going or what kind of car he is going to travel in.

 - "Papon's Paper Trail," p.122

But the bulk of the book ends up being personal - the big news stories are largely about his angle on them, and the greatest pleasures of the book are in the Gopnik family life. (Gopnik knew this, in assembling the book; he says as much in the first piece. Good writers know their material.) And, near the end, the family grows with another child, in a way that Gopnik the writer must have thought was the perfect bit of material to close out the collection. He got some good stuff out of that, too:

In New York, in other words, pregnancy is a medical condition that, after proper care by people in white coats and a brief hospital stay, can have a "positive outcome." In Paris it is something that has happened because of sex, which, with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York pregnancy is a ward in the house of medicine; in Paris it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.

 - "Like a King," p.301

Paris to the Moon had a vogue, but I bet it's still read avidly today. I mean, people still read the Peter Mayle books about Provence, and those are a decade older. Good writing lasts, and this is good writing. It may be bittersweet to look at the dates and realize the small boy traipsing through these pages is probably about to turn thirty - I'm not going to look him up to see what he's doing - but that's how time works. This made me want to read more Gopnik, more New Yorker writers, more about Paris - more good books, in general, and who could ask for more?