Adam Gopnik, BA’80, DLitt’13, and his wife Martha Parker, BA’80, in 2013 when he received an honorary doctorate from McGill. (Photo: Owen Egan)

Culture

Adam Gopnik goes back in (New York) time

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, BA’80, DLitt’13, recently published a book about what life was like in New York in the eighties. He is increasingly worried about what life is like today, with Donald Trump as U.S. president.

Story by Brenda Branswell

December 2017

In his new memoir, At the Strangers’ Gate, Adam Gopnik writes about settling into a life in New York City in the 1980s, newly married and recently arrived from the north.

The idea of moving to New York popped up on Gopnik’s radar partway through his art history degree at McGill.

“When I was growing up in Montreal, New York seemed like a terribly, not so much intimidating, but dangerous place to go,” says Gopnik, BA’80, a staff writer at The New Yorker since the mid-eighties. “This was the 1970s. It was the height of sort of Taxi Driver New York.”

However, a summer trip to New York in 1978 with girlfriend and future wife, Martha Parker, BA’80, left them smitten. Gopnik, who loves jazz, says cabaret jazz was still omnipresent in the city.

“You could hear the great Ellis Larkins playing just for the price of a drink at the Carnegie Tavern. We came away just enamoured of it.”

They loved Montreal – still do – but wanted to experience something different, he says. “We wanted another stage, a bigger scene.”

In his latest book, Gopnik recounts how he and Parker arrived in New York and rented “the world’s smallest apartment”, a 9″x11″ cockroach-infested space. Their next rental, a loft in SoHo, proved to be an incredible find in Manhattan’s pricey and fiercely competitive real-estate market, although it, too, had unwelcome visitors — this time, rats.

He writes about their life in the city and his work experiences, including giving lunchtime lectures at the Museum of Modern Art and landing a job editing fashion pages at GQ. He also aims “to try and tell something about New York in the ’80s in a more social, historical way.”

Gopnik acknowledges feeling nostalgic for aspects of 1980s’ New York.

When he lived in SoHo, it was a “coherent village of art”, an anthropology of its own.

“There’s no avant-garde frontier left in New York,” Gopnik adds. “The enormous sense of variety and pluralism that was so much part of New York. There was a film district, and a garment district, and the guys in the schmata trade pushed their racks through the streets.”

Gopnik has been travelling across North America to promote the memoir. “I’ve been in France as well and then I’ll be in England for a couple of weeks in early December. The book will come out in the U.K. then, too.

He already has plans for another book, on liberalism.

In a column in The New Yorker last summer, Gopnik wrote about a “national emergency” and “the need for leadership among the coalition of leftists, liberals, independents, and conservatives of integrity who oppose Trump.”

During his brief visit to McGill in October, Gopnik spoke bluntly and critically about U.S. President Donald Trump in an interview.

In the normal oscillation of power, progressive liberals are replaced by right-wing conservatives, Gopnik says. “It happens in Canada, it happens in Britain, it happens in the United States. No matter how passionately you oppose the alternative party, you can’t live in a liberal democracy unless you accept the oscillation of power.”

The problem is not conservative politics, Gopnik argues. “The problem is in an authoritarian personality. And that’s an emergency.”

Everyone has a duty “not to normalize this,” he adds. “And that’s the thing that I think I find most appalling, that every day the abnormal becomes a little more normalized.”

Gopnik, who received an honorary degree from McGill in 2013, also took part in assistant professor of English Merve Emre’s Contemporary American Culture and Literature class during his October visit. He fielded questions from the professor and students, talking about writing, his youth in Montreal, and courting Parker who lived in a Montreal suburb. (The 165 bus to get to her home was the “Venetian gondola of my romantic experience,” Gopnik cracked.)

Born in Philadelphia, Gopnik came to Montreal as a preteen. His parents taught at McGill. His father Irwin, a retired associate professor of English, served as dean of students for many years. His mother Myrna is a professor emerita of linguistics.

Gopnik’s deep affection for the hockey team of his youth has stayed with him.

“There are few things in life more important to me than the Montreal Canadiens,” Gopnik said after the class.

“And I’ve suffered now in years of mediocrity as I exulted once in years of excellence. It’s a source of bemusement and humour in my family and among my friends, but it’s a very serious fixation of mine. For me, it’s not a nostalgic joke. I live and die with the Habs, as I did when I was 12.”

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