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.