Paris to the Moon

A review of Adam Gopnick's book

In 1995, Adam Gopnick, who writes for the New Yorker, moved to Paris with his wife and young child. Over the course of five years living there, he wrote about his various experiences in the form of essays and occassionally journals, writings which have been compiled into a book titled Paris to the Moon.

For all the promise of its charming title and the potential of a literary exploration of a marvellous city, it is not a good book. Paris to the Moon is a book with a few points of interest and some relatively heinous parts; the remainder fails to inspire. It fails to inspire this reader, at least, who has been to Paris several times, and has found much to love about that city. None of that love was rekindled by this book.

There are several key problems with Paris to the Moon, and most of them stem from the capacity in which Mr. Gopnick experienced Paris. His perspective is that of a New Yorker with a wife and child, lots of money, and mad connections. Admittedly, this provides a unique look at Paris, one that this reviewer could not afford to take, especially given his aversion to hasty marriage and his lack of progeny. But each twist in Mr. Gopnick's perspective ends up weakening his book.

It is no fault of his that he has a wife and kid-these are honorable things, really. But it seems that a book ostensibly about Paris should focus on Paris, not on one's family. It is interesting to see what Gopnick's son fancies in Paris, and his adventures with the carousel and the puppet show present a valuable perspective. But Gopnick spends far too much time fawning over his two-to-five-year-old and little enough relaying the kid's experiences. The main exceptions are extended chapters on how he tells his son stories about baseball, and how his son falls in love at the Ritz swimming pool; these offer no real feeling for life in Paris.

Which leads to the second point: how is the Ritz exemplary of the wonders of life in Paris? Gopnick had too much money to throw around, and it is with chagrin that one reads how he spent hundreds of dollars on Christmas tree lights. We hear of his meetings with three-star chefs, his attendance of a haute couture show, his attempts to join New York style health clubs. Is this Parisian life, or the inside track as viewed with prestigious connnections? There are plenty of food and fashion and fitness magazines that cover this kind of thing already. One chapter asks and explores the question: which is more fashoinable, the Café Flore or Les Deux Magots? Answer: Who cares? The history lesson is enthralling, but there are in fact a number of normal cafés in modern Paris where pretense does not enhance the experience, and their characters are certainly worthy of note as well.

Gopnick is too much in love with America, and this sometimes does severe damage to his powers of courtesy. To his credit, he learns to love soccer and the French health care system, among (a few) other things. But he spends days, hundreds of francs, and dozens of pages trying to find American life in Paris-the aforementioned health club, runs in the Luxembourg Garden (the French don't run), etc. This is an okay thing to do for a couple months, maybe, as one acclimates to a new society; but then it's time to realize that you're living in France, and start living in France. His money and connections provide effective insulation from real French life-he can buy American life if all else fails, and does. The worst is his invention of take-out food in Paris, a totally foreign concept to the French that would be better left that way. But he must have it, and in the process he (his maid actually, but who's keeping track?) carelessly forgets to return ceramic dishes leant to him by a restaurant, which soon goes out of business. His feeling of guilt comes as an aside that might come across as sincere to the gullible reader.

There is much to love about Paris, and about French culture. Gopnick discovered some of it, but given five years and 300 pages to work with, he manages to relate remarkably little. There are cute stories about his kid, a touching attempt to save a classy brasserie from selling out, and a few keen observations and explanations of the differences between France and America (which could, however, be found in any textbook summary of French culture); he even favors France on occasion, which almost redeems his professed francophilia. But if he did in fact come up with as much as he could have in that time, he might have done us the favor of putting a bit more of it in his book.