Adam Gopnik's Reading List

"Yes, absolutely. He was a caricaturist with remarkable insight and relatively little malice in his parodies and cartoons. He found the pomposities of over-zealous ideology absurd. He also had a lovely vein of affection. One of my favourite of his picture-books is called Rossetti and H is Circle . It’s basically imaginary pictures of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very complicated domestic life. The implicit theme of the whole book is that behind the Pre-Raphaelite dream of the perfect Botticelli nymph and the medieval romantic life is this very funny, furtive domestic life in Chelsea [London]. Constantly referring dream-life back to reality is another way Beerbohm works. For me, Beerbohm has an almost dangerously perfect tone – a mixture of benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority that I think is the tone every essayist searches for. It’s not accidental that Beerbohm was influential on the first generation of The New Yorker writers, people like Wolcott Gibbs. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of the dangers of that tone, though, is that it can seem unduly complacent or self-satisfied. I suspect that the note of complacency in Beerbohm’s writing is kind of out of kilter with the times. It’s a note that was so hugely popular for 50 or 60 years that I guess it came to seem old-fashioned. If you ever read old collections of light editorials from The London Times , they all strive for the Beerbohm sound. Inevitably, when a sound gets imitated for too long it becomes a little empty. Beerbohm is also not a writer of fanatic passion or political certainty. You can’t consult him directly for the quote you might need about the topic of the day. For those reasons, he’s gone a bit out of fashion. But he remains a wonderful writer, and for me the best witness of that period – the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the modern age. Literature. My favourite of his essays are ones like “A Clergyman”, which is a very close, loving analysis of an obscure passage of [James] Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson . A clergyman, identified in no other way, squeaks out a little objection to something Dr Johnson has said, and Johnson crushes him with his rejoinder. Beerbohm reflects on the lost and hidden life of this clergyman, who made one brief bid for literary immortality and whose name even Boswell couldn’t recall. Another favourite is called “William and Mary”, and is a memory of a couple he has known since his Oxford days. It’s a really beautiful story that has an almost Proustian quality."

"Exactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable. I think that’s true. There’s a sense in which both Woolf and Beerbohm come after the age of Victorian literary industry. They both take for granted this common pool of Dickens , [George] Eliot and Trollope – writers of huge industry, enormous achievement and vast social observation – and they both make a quiet case for the miniature, for the perfectly wrought. So there’s a kind of running commentary on Victorian fiction in both of their work. I also think, without having illusions about the nature of the societies in which they worked, that there is a strong lure of a stable and secure literary society in their work. They both feel themselves to be at home with literature, not out of place in any way. Their tone – unlike certain American essayists – does not give a sense of having an uncertain or anxious relationship to literature. One of the dirty secrets of literature, I’ve always thought, is that there are much stronger “pop” elements to great writing than we would like to admit. The Great Gatsby appeals to us, at least in part, because it’s about rich people and bootleggers in the roaring twenties. Beerbohm and Woolf appeal to us, in part, because of the worlds they live in. Chelsea and Bloomsbury in the early part of the 20th century seem to us, at least, thrillingly stable."

"White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and Beerbohm suddenly look stuffy and literary. White has an amazing ability, which I still marvel at, to come very close to a faux-naïve simplicity that’s excessive and then pull it back. I’m just picking up one of his collections. I’m going to open it up at random and look for a sentence that captures White. Here’s one from a piece called “The Trailer Park”: “Before sitting down to draft a preamble to the constitution of a world federations of democracies uniting free people under one banner, I decided I would mosey over to the trailer park at the edge of town and ask some of the campers whether they favoured any such idea of this union.” The virtue of White’s kind of writing is to start with something that sounds pompous and editorial and then use a verb like “mosey over” to make it work. He cleans up the prose of the essay. Both Beerbohm and Woolf are belle-lettrist sort of writers and they connect to that leisurely tradition. White is a much more urbane and American writer. “Death of a Pig”, in this collection, is a very good one. We have a section in the New Yorker called “Notes & Comments”, which White wrote for over 40 years. If you can find his comment pieces, they’re particularly wonderful. They appear in most of his collections in one form or another, and are the ones that I relish most. They’re kind of perfect miniatures."

"Jarrell, for me, is the absolute master of what I like to think of as “cabaret criticism”. The man has endless wit. I think his novel Pictures From an Institution is the single wittiest book of the last century, even though I’ve read it 10 times and can never recall the story! He’s a very poor storyteller but an amazingly witty writer. Jarrell is a comedian of a kind. He always finds something not just witty in a literary way but outright funny to say about extremely serious subjects – about Auden, [Robert] Graves, Laura Riding or Wallace Stevens. I admire that ability to turn straight, old-fashioned literary criticism into a constant performance in the best sense – into a form of entertainment in itself. He supplied a new tone of enormous, wonderful excitability. That’s one of the things I love about Jarrell, and one of the things I struggle to infuse my own work with – a sense of excitement and pleasure even in the driest texts. Most of all he’s just a wonderful joker. Again, let me open the book and take a sentence at random. Here’s one. He’s writing about [Walt] Whitman: “The interesting thing about Whitman’s worst language (for, just as few poets have ever written better, few poets have written worse) is how unusually absurd, how really ingeniously bad, such language is.” It’s that tone of hyperbolic excitability in the presence of literature, which is a constant antidote to the solemnity and false seriousness of most literary study. That’s very true. I think all the interesting writers of my generation drew the high brow-low brow line in a very different way to Jarrell’s generation. We all came of age – I’m thinking of Louis Menand or Martin Amis or Clive James – when there seemed to be more genuine artistic energy in popular culture, movies and rock music in particular, than there was in high culture. The experience of The Beatles or Fellini or the Godfather films illuminated our understanding of high culture, rather than the other way around. I think that is a true fault line in the history of modern writing – you’re either on one side of it or the other. A little of both. Jarrell writes wonderfully about race cars and American football . He was no snob. But as far as I remember he never references jazz – which is a kind of in-between form of pop culture, more culture than pop in lots of ways. You have to remember too that for Jarrell’s generation, the GI generation, they were in the process of recognising and discovering what we now think of as high culture. My own father was one of that generation. For him, each piece of high culture he achieved, understood, enjoyed – whether it was Bach or Milton – was part of a mountain climbed. We all, in a sense, started too easily – somewhere up on the mountain – because of their work, and therefore had a different view of it. I like the title essay, even though I don’t share his views. But my favourite is the one called “The Taste of the Age”."

"In 1980, Knopf did an anthology of his essays called First Reactions . In a curious way it was an advantage to read him flat-out as a writer. All of my friends in England read him as an entanglement of personal presence and prose style. I read him simply as prose style, without any knowledge of what his personal presence was like. He has some of Jarrell’s excitability in the presence of creative energy. He has the ability to bring you into his writing, even when he’s writing about things that are in some ways utterly trivial and often completely forgotten, like British TV of the 1970s. He has a way of turning each of those subjects into a wonderful essay – an exercise in cabaret criticism – about values. Values, I think, are his real subject. The overriding lesson of his work is that categories – high art, low art, television, theatre – are misleading guides to value. That even runs at a deeper, moral level in James’s work about the larger categories – provincial and metropolitan, for instance. He’s a provincial guy who comes to the city, but his provincial experience is in lots of ways richer than his metropolitan experience. It’s the rejection of categories in place of values that is the Montaigne-like takeaway in all his work. Whereas Jarrell, Beerbohm and White were in different ways direct elements in the long-simmering braise that produced my prose style, for whatever it’s worth, Clive came along when I was already, in some sense, a formed writer. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But I did learn one very specific thing from his writing. He’s a very linear writer. His essays are always organised around sharp, direct and forward-pushing sentences. Whereas with Virginia Woolf your first response to one of her paragraphs, in the best way, is to read it again. Your first response to a Clive James piece is to keep on reading. I learned a great deal about how to make a piece propulsive from reading him. As with Woolf, the joy is cumulative – it’s the pleasure of reading all of his work. But here’s a good one. It’s a television column from December 3rd 1972 which goes from an argument between the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, to a documentary on “Bomber” Harris and the morality of area bombing, to a production of Oedipus Rex , to a new David Mercer play. In the midst of it, this comes up: “Why, then, with all this talent [in the production of Oedipus], including a sumptuous lighting design that covers the décor with spiced gloom, does the production have so little sting? The answer, I think, is that there’s not much point in trying to supply a binding image to a play whose author was so intent on leaving imagery out. It’s difficult to think of Sophocles looking with favour on any attempt to pin his universalised theme to mere political instability.” That’s a deep and original thought, perfectly expressed, which rises out of the normal eddies of TV journalism. That combination of range, ease and aphoristic subtlety is what I love in Clive’s work."

"One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America. “One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition” We wanted to honor this lifelong commitment to serving the cause of reform: egalitarian measures, rights for working people and, above all, that great American tradition of listening to those who don’t get listened to, hearing and seeing people who don’t often get to speak or be seen—a tradition that extends back to Lewis Hine, Upton Sinclair and countless others. She seems to have both embodied that tradition and renewed it. What makes her work exceptional is that it comes to us both as a personal witness of a very moving kind, and as part of a broader political project of an admirably consistent sort."

"Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well. She wrote a well-known book on what she called ‘ The Romance of American Communism’ , about the personal entanglements of American leftists during the long Stalinist nightmare, and she’s written novels, but I think that the core of her activity has been exactly this kind of extended critical essay, the classic form of the essay, where a personal exploration of experience is married to and meets an equally classic form of critical reading. And that’s a very rich American tradition. Hers is obviously a body of work that’s been highly influential on later generations of writers—not just on women writers, of course, but particularly on women writers. Her admirers find in her mix of deep reading and self-inspection, a template for engaged work, and they value, too, the acid and self-confident candour of her judgements."

"I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony. It seems to me that that’s been one of the richest of American genres, and largely overlooked in recent years. Pyle is a writer who has spent his entire life, all of his writerly activity, writing that kind of easily neglected and overlooked essay—including a wonderful study of the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, that marked my first acquaintance with his mind. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to find in New York Magazine or, for that matter, often in The New Yorker anymore, but is a vital part of a long, golden thread of American work. So honoring his work was a way both of honoring that tradition and the leading living American practitioner of that tradition. It was a way both of honoring the career of a remarkable but somewhat overlooked writer and also of reminding us that on the spectrum of the American essay, along with the political essays, it is just as important to pay attention to the non-political essay, the essay of natural life—which, of course, as with Thoreau so with Pyle, suggests a politics of its own."

"One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a reminder—and I think this is generally true about the books in this sequence—that the special contribution the essayist makes to public debate is not to sharpen the arguments, nor necessarily to broaden the field of evidence as a social scientist might do, but to give us the intense particularism of individual witness on the issues that everyone is talking about. Nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation—she writes about them, not from a distance, but from an exquisite and micro-accented point of view."

"Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance. But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well. One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one."