I used to be more attracted to Gopnik's pieces but now they usually seem to me highly superficial. The subjects attract me more than the writing, which meanders its way, via the New Yorker's usual formal cadences and Gopnik's polished one-liners (it wouldn't be too hard to work out a template for those one-liners, I think) to a completely unsurprising conclusion.
This piece about C S Lewis may have been the beginning of my disillusionment with Gopnik. The tone was rather pointlessly cynical (Lewis was never a 'prisoner of Narnia', contrary to the title of the article); the conclusion easily predictable (it fits Gopnik's pose of 'studied secularism' to a tee; he comes to almost exactly the same conclusion in an article he wrote on Chesterton). And, indeed, he appears to have stolen at least one of his one-liners from Lewis to get there! (It's at the end of the first page, about Lewis pacing a prison of his own making, bla bla bla. Lewis uses the same metaphor in his 'Preface to Paradise Lost'.) Since it seems fairly unlikely that this is some kind of a weird in-joke or hint to knowledgeable Lewis readers, lazy intellectual borrowing seems the only answer.
Clearly I have been positively BRIMMING over with outrage and you gave me a chance to vent! (That's how things usually happen on the net, isn't it?)
Maybe I just have no sense of due proportion. During the course of a recent Facebook conversation, meandering, and touching on a numberr of different subjects, I posted a giant defence of William Blake against base accusations of misogyny (ie, a small comment by one commenter about something not related to the general topic of conversation, more or less as an aside).
I used to be more attracted to Gopnik's pieces but now they usually seem to me highly superficial. The subjects attract me more than the writing, which meanders its way, via the New Yorker's usual formal cadences and Gopnik's polished one-liners (it wouldn't be too hard to work out a template for those one-liners, I think) to a completely unsurprising conclusion.
ReplyDeleteThis piece about C S Lewis may have been the beginning of my disillusionment with Gopnik. The tone was rather pointlessly cynical (Lewis was never a 'prisoner of Narnia', contrary to the title of the article); the conclusion easily predictable (it fits Gopnik's pose of 'studied secularism' to a tee; he comes to almost exactly the same conclusion in an article he wrote on Chesterton). And, indeed, he appears to have stolen at least one of his one-liners from Lewis to get there! (It's at the end of the first page, about Lewis pacing a prison of his own making, bla bla bla. Lewis uses the same metaphor in his 'Preface to Paradise Lost'.) Since it seems fairly unlikely that this is some kind of a weird in-joke or hint to knowledgeable Lewis readers, lazy intellectual borrowing seems the only answer.
ReplyDeleteYou're a very thorough critic, Tim!
ReplyDeleteClearly I have been positively BRIMMING over with outrage and you gave me a chance to vent! (That's how things usually happen on the net, isn't it?)
ReplyDeleteMaybe I just have no sense of due proportion. During the course of a recent Facebook conversation, meandering, and touching on a numberr of different subjects, I posted a giant defence of William Blake against base accusations of misogyny (ie, a small comment by one commenter about something not related to the general topic of conversation, more or less as an aside).
Well, I enjoyed it at least.