Short Takes
Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
By Adam Gopnik
A true city child, Adam Gopnik's 3-year-old daughter, Olivia, has an imaginary friend who is too busy to play with her. ``Charlie Ravioli" is always grabbing lunch, hopping into cabs, running off to meetings. Eventually, Ravioli is too busy even for these breathless encounters and fobs Olivia off on his assistant. Gopnik finds that, having been rejected by Charlie, Olivia is free to pursue her own adventures. The best essays in this wonderful collection focus on Gopnik's two children, Olivia and her four-year-older brother, Luke.
From the death of Olivia's fish, Bluie, Gopnik extracts an unlikely result. Bluie's replacement is named Lucky, but is soon called Bluie. Gopnik explains, ``We begin with the problem of mind, pass through the experience of pain -- and end up loving the same old fish." Like Olivia, Luke is a city child, overscheduled with lessons, clubs, teams. He has his enthusiasms -- chess and football. The coach of his football team, the Giant Metrozoids, is Kirk Varnedoe, art history professor and a curator at the Modern Museum of Art. ``The Last of the Metrozoids" movingly recounts the team's elegant learning curve. Varnedoe, brilliant lecturer and coach, dies of cancer at the end of the season, having demystified many of the world's puzzles and exemplified the difference between men and heroes. Not surprisingly, real estate figures prominently in the collection, along with the unexpected -- feral parakeets in Flatbush, and the true story of Purim.
The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them
Edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen
Gotham, 176 pp., $17.50
The 71 authors who offered up the books that changed their lives are given only a few pages to explain their choices. The scant space allows for little more than happy hoorays and heartfelt blessings. Most authors return to childhood and the book that first pulled them into someone's else's world, immersed them in a strange atmosphere, allowed them to identify in someone else what they felt themselves. Thus ``The Catcher in the Rye" appears more than once, as do Nancy Drew, ``To Kill a Mockingbird," and ``The Great Gatsby."
Only Frank McCourt gives himself the luxury of telling a story. As a child in the fever hospital, young Francis breaks the rules by talking to the other patients. One gives him a book, which has a magical line from Shakespeare's ``Henry VIII." Frank Rich finds in Moss Hart's ``Act One" a story that matches his own ``yearning, confusion, and fear." Dorothy Allison, raised in a poor, brutal white family, understands Toni Morrison's world in ``The Bluest Eye." ``I had been used like that, had learned to hate myself for it, had put my lips to the cup of bitterness and rinsed my mouth with the liquor stink of self-hatred and shame." In my favorite entry, Michael Stern glories in the wonders of the illustrated Sears catalog, which presented him in one volume with ``twentieth-century America's ideal image of itself."
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
