Adam Gopnik’s New York

If it’s deliciously intelligent discourse you want, with wide-ranging allusions (when
was the last time you heard someone cite D’Artagnan’s advice from his father on
leaving Gascony for Paris?) and occasional high-culture belly laughs, too, then head up
to the Rose Building on the Lincoln Center campus and get ready to be charmed and
disarmed. Adam Gopnik’s New York is short (90-odd minutes), sweet, and
provocative.

Adam Gopnik’s New York is all New York. Art, snowflakes, Central Park, child raising,
pluralism and individualism, and his quest of writing with what he calls “a wild
exactitude.” All New York, yes, except when he takes what he calls left turns from the
discussion which lead—well, one gets the sense that he has more ready-to-tell stories
than time allows, so each performance might differ somewhat. (After decades as a
popular lecturer on what his wife and children refer to as his “perpetual tuition tour,”
he is clearly comfortable on stage or podium.) Gopnik’s smoothly free and easy
delivery makes it all seem simple and off-the-cuff, belying the likelihood that every
sentence was meticulously sculpted.

Yes, Gopnik strives to concentrate on discussing New York as seen through his
perceptive eyes. But he strays, again and again, at one point winding up in Venice. (His
longtime Upper East Side analyst unaccountably decrees that “you will order the
linguine alle vongole, and then you will be happy.”) As it happens, on the very night
when Adam Gopnik’s New York closes, I myself will be sitting in an osteria in
Dorsoduro, inevitably digging into a plate of linguine alla vongole. Happy, I suppose—
Venice and vongole will do that to you—but I don’t imagine it will be quite as
nourishing as spending 90 minutes at Lincoln Center with Adam Gopnik in Adam
Gopnik’s New York.