Adam Gopnik is best known as an award-winning essayist and critic. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Gopnik was dispatched to Paris for five years and wrote about his time there in The Paris Journals, which appeared in the magazine, and were later collected in Paris to the Moon.
He also wrote a fantasy novel for children, The King in the Window, set in the City of Light and dedicated it to his son.
Now a denizen once again of New York, Gopnik has written another collection of essays called Through the Children's Gate, with the same passion that marked the Paris book.
And as a companion piece, one might say, he has written another fantasy, this one for his daughter – a companion piece because The Steps Across the Water seems to grow out of his thoughts about making a home for a family in this beloved adopted city, one he calls a “city of many maps.”
He talks about passing, both literally and metaphorically, through the children's gate, the entrance to Central Park at 76th Street and Fifth Avenue. And it is through that very gate, at nightfall, that his heroine, 10-year-old Rose, enters, determined to find the steps across the water she glimpsed earlier: a crystalline staircase shimmering over what I think must be Turtle Pond.
At the other end of the steps is U Nork, where things are not going well. The U Norkers having been waiting for Rose to take on the Ice Queen, for it was Rose's “beaming and gracious face” they saw in the sky after the Snow Queen's malevolent gaze was first witnessed there. Among other things, the Snow Queen has threatened to “crush each tower with the weight of a hundred winters' snows.”
Which brings me back to Through the Children's Gate, where Gopnik says, “Every age and city are scared of something. … The real question that pressed itself upon us as parents was how to let our children live in joy in a time of fear, how to give light enough to live in when what we saw were so many shadows.” I think The Steps Across the Water attempts, in fanciful fashion, to address that issue.
U Nork is a spectacular “city of the future,” rendered in Bruce McCall's stylish paintings as reminiscent of the 1939 New York World's Fair. But U Nork has grown spectacularly nuts and is now in peril.
There are vivid descriptions of the real New York and its delightfully wonky sister city. Gopnik writes city well. There is also wit and humour, both goofy and sly, the latter lobbed over the head of the child reader with a wink from the clever writer to the adult crowd. Gopnik writes clever well. He's urbane, a culture maven; food, fine and fantastic, finds it way into these pages in sometimes hilarious fashion. That sous-chefs wield the ultimate weapon in the war against the Snow Queen is not surprising. Oh, and there is word play galore: Sin Trail Park, Square Time Square Squared, and the Super Natural History Museum, to name a few examples.
But …
The narrative as a whole is infuriating. The story is weighed down – buried – by plot, most of which is doled out in lengthy gobs of backstory fed to Rose by a cavalcade of useful informants. Oy! The explanations go on and on. Rose never acts with a shred of believable motivation. No one does. And there is never a crisis too urgent that it can't be interrupted for a snippet of info on a notable New York landmark or just some amusing diversion. Gopnik, too, is guilty of mystery mongering; no one will tell anyone anything in a timely fashion because … well, that would give away the story.
But …
In its final movement, we see something quite fine: the genuine and heartfelt sentiment that seems to have inspired this otherwise confusing romp. We get a strong sense of the fear of living in a city that is both vibrant and vulnerable, dazzling and dangerous. There is also a moving passage about what family is – what to be a family means. Gopnik's stellar collections of essays celebrate family as much as they do the urban experience. And the fantasies, I guess, celebrate two extraordinary cities and two extraordinary children. That's nice. Too bad the story is all over the map.
Tim Wynne-Jones has written 32 books for children of all ages. His new young adult novel, Blink & Caution, will be out in March.
