April 5, 2010 Issue

“I suppose” is one of Calvin Trillin’s signature moves for jump-starting his travel stories: “I suppose I could say that we decided to take a house in the South of France for a month because …” (“Hanging Around in Uzes”); “I suppose you could say that we went to Guadeloupe one cold winter as a gesture of support for its efforts to celebrate female chefs” (“A Woman’s Place”). This week in the magazine, Adam Gopnik tries it out in his piece “No Rules!”: “I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if the Paris-based French food-guide-and-festival group that calls itself Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has to set out to accomplish – which seems to be nothing less than save the preeminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner – if I had an easier time defining what it is and truly hopes to do.” As a hook, does that work for you? It doesn’t for me. For one thing, it’s too convoluted. For another, it’s too abstract. Like a good cook, Trillin keeps it simple. I pushed myself to read “No Rules!”. I found myself not enjoying it much. It wasn’t always this way with Gopnik’s writing, was it? There was a time when I clipped his articles from the magazine and saved them in a folder. I think that folder still exists somewhere, buried in a box of old clothes, photo albums, etc. in our basement. I remember one early piece – it was about an old guy who spent all his time hanging out at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. It contained some great descriptions of the hotel, including this dandy (I looked it up on-line just now in the New Yorker archives): “he would … enter the hotel under the long, sloping green-and-white striped awning that extended all the way from the driveway, above Sunset Boulevard, to the main entrance.” And I remember the pleasure I experienced reading his writings about (in no particular order) Audubon, shaker furniture, Joseph Cornell and Times Square, to name but a few. Unfortunately, he diluted that pleasure when he wrote what has to be one of the silliest comments the magazine ever published. I’m referring to Gopnik’s “Blame Canada” (March 2, 2002), in which he sketched a Canada I hardly recognized. Among other crazy things, he said, “The Mounties are there in their bright-red uniforms to say, ‘Shoot if you want, we'd rather talk.’” Well, like most generalizations, this one breaks down as soon as you start discussing specific cases. I know of Mounties who would not hesitate, and who have not hesitated, to meet fire with fire. Gopnik’s taint is his penchant for generalizing. Take “No Rules!” for example, where he says sweepingly, “In America and England, you are what you think about eating.” Is that really the case? What about all those straitlaced investors, lawyers and accountants who are devoutly conservative in their values, but who regularly dine at all those great creative little restaurants we read about in Tables For Two? I find more and more that Gopnik’s writing lacks specificity. There isn’t one memorable concrete sentence in “No Rules!”, unless you count his description of Zoe Reyners (“an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigette Fossey”). What’s happened to the writer who noticed that long, sloping green-and-white striped awning at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Perhaps he’s losing his touch. And yet … and yet, I can’t give up on him. Every now and then he produces a pearl. For example, three years ago in a piece called “New York Local” (September 3 & 10, 2007), he wrote this opening line: “Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx.” Now that’s what I call a hook! It’s why I keep reading Gopnik.