What Is Adam Gopnik Talking About?
In this week's New Yorker, Adam Gopnik muses on the role food and cooking play in fiction.
Gopnik is a very smart fellow, loves food, and is often a lovely, affecting, clear-eyed writer (I remember a wonderful story he wrote about his late mentor Kirk Varnedoe teaching his kids to play football in Central Park), but for the life of me I can't figure out what he's trying to say in this piece. Maybe I'm not well-read enough. So if anybody else can figure it out, please comment.
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3 Comments:
(The story is "Last of the Metrozoids" and is not currently on the New Yorker's site, but it does appears in Gopnik's collection Through The Children's Gate; it was nominated for Best Essay category in the 2005 National Magazine Awards and one of the writers of Six Feet Under wrote a screenplay of it for the producer Kathleen Kennedy.)
Lia Bulaong at 11:02AM on 04/04/07
I don't think it's anything deeply profound, just some musings on how and why we are connected to food and cooking in fiction, and how this connection can serve as a metaphor for our connection to fiction as a whole.
Mazzer at 12:04PM on 04/04/07
I completely agreed! It was quite a wayward piece--or topic? I thought it was interesting point he made about cooking as a modern device in literature--but why try to recreate recipes that aren't really fleshed out? I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't get it!
Cathy@noteatingoutinny at 10:21PM on 04/04/07