Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined
boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around
every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has
captured the American imagination for as long as there have
been Americans.
In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and
their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of
New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light.
Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the
magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his
was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had
for so long been the undisputed capital of everything
cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise
a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg
Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a
child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of
that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive.
So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad,
Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed
philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as
violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as
readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris
Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the
matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day,
not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals
preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were
filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games;
weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated
a "culinary crisis."
As Gopnik describes in this
funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a
foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely
dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages,
a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With
singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the
mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what
it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of
the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental
reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were
instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn,
which I believe is why they call it an education."
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