Books in Brief
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology, edited by Adam Gopnik (Library of America, 613 pp., $40). The new anthology from the Library of America, Americans in Paris, is an annoying work–especially if you actually know anything about Paris. This patchwork quilt of impressions from famous and not-so-famous writers seems designed solely to confirm every hackneyed, half-baked, and outdated idea of the city that an American may have acquired.
Or perhaps I should say, every hackneyed, half-baked, and outdated idea that an American who reads the New Yorker may have acquired. For several years, Adam Gopnik wrote the “Paris Journal” for the New Yorker, and he still writes as though he’s nibbling on his first baguette. As it happens, I remember something of Paris. I was married the morning my husband and I first departed for France, and when I finally managed to return to New York from Paris, thirty years later, I discovered that the only thing New Yorkers seemed interested in asking was whether I knew a good French restaurant anywhere near midtown. I finally began refusing any luncheon date at “a wonderful little French place. You’ll think you’re back in Paris”–responding by asking if we couldn’t eat Chinese instead.
My response to Americans in Paris is similar: Can’t we read Chinese instead? For his anthology, Gopnik has selected snippets of Americans undergoing their Parisian experiences, from Thomas Jefferson in the late 1700s down through Dorothea Tanning in the late 1900s. Of Tanning, widow of Max Ernst, Gopnik asks us to note “that her favorite haunt, the restaurant Aux Charpentiers, is still alive and kicking and more or less intact, all these decades later. Paris really is sometimes a perfectly still feast.”
Well, yes. And sometimes it’s not a feast at all. In fact, the Paris your grandfather loved, and loved to complain about, is no more. The architecture and history remain, but the myths about how curious the French are, how they don’t want to speak English, and how they find it difficult to establish friendships with visitors are just that: myths. My late husband spoke French well enough that he was always taken for French (Jean-Luc Godard once asked him if he happened to speak any English, as he wanted to cast him in a small part). But my accent was always a giveaway, and the French claimed they could spot me even before I’d opened my mouth–because I had “that hopelessly innocent look that Americans have.”
Henry James, of course, understood the naive and innocent American, and if one must have the idées reçues with which the 613 pages of Americans in Paris are filled, James’s short story “The Velvet Glove” is not a bad choice. But one does wonder why the publisher chose to commission such a subject. Surely the original intention for the Library of America was to bring into print standard editions of standard American authors–particularly those whose day of popularity had passed, so contemporary literature could appreciate them anew. The recent republication of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy is a good example of what the Library of America is supposed to be for–and why they are so deeply subsidized.
What similar purpose does Americans in Paris serve? I’m sure Adam Gopnik had a good time putting together this catchall of clichés, written mostly by rather-too-familiar names. But the rest of us could have been spared the turgid sentimentality of “The Last Meal I Ate in Paris.”
—Cynthia Grenier
Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgon by Jon L. Breen (Crippen & Landru, 182 pp., $17). For three years now, Jon L. Breen has been reviewing mystery novels for THE WEEKLY STANDARD–but he’s also the author of six mysteries of his own, winner of two Edgar awards, and creator of Ed Gorgon, the reluctant umpire detective who always makes the right call. The Gorgon stories have been quietly appearing in various magazines over the last thirty years, and Breen has finally cleared the bases, collecting them in a single volume. A home run for mystery readers.
—Joseph Bottum
