At home in the big city

Gopnik is at his best as a writer when he stays closest to his heart. There are also enjoyable essays on the wild parrots of Brooklyn ("Power and the Parrot"), fine dining ("The Cooking Game"), and the death of department stores ("Under One Roof"), but the truly memorable pieces in the book tend to be the ones most closely tied to the author's personal experience.

He writes deftly – with a neatly calibrated balance of wit and pathos – of the loss of a family pet ("Death of a Fish"), the last days of Kurt Varnedoe the art historian, one of Gopnik's best friends, and – briefly – his son's football coach ("Last of the Metrozoids"), and the way it feels to watch your child in a school production of "Peter Pan" ("First Thanksgiving: Densities").

There is also a hilarious and poignant piece ("Bumping into Mr. Ravioli") about his daughter Olivia's imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli, a friend so busy that they can connect only by cellphone. (When it reaches the point where Olivia can no longer reach Charlie himself directly and can talk only with his assistant, Laurie, the Gopniks consult Adam's sister, a child psychologist. She tells them emphatically that, outside New York, children's imaginary friends don't have assistants. " 'I think you should move,' she said flatly.")

One of the chief pleasures of "Through the Children's Gate" is the way it combines Gopnik's urbane wit with a kind of sweet vulnerability that seems to come at us from another century. In the book's closing essay, "Last Thanksgiving: Immensities," Gopnik writes of the special affinity he feels for a book called "A London Child of the 1870s" and there is, indeed, a good deal in "Through the Children's Gate" that – despite Charlie Ravioli and his cellphone – somehow manages to evoke the feel of cultured, middle-class life in any lovely, major European city a century or so ago.

There is also much here that is universal, particularly the acknowledgement of the sweetness of parenthood – a joy marred only by the knowledge that it won't last, that the children, even at their youngest and most precious stages, are already preparing to leave.

In the end, Gopnik gives the final word to the Freudian: "Life does have many worthwhile aspects, but the trouble is that the really worthwhile ones are worth too much and last only a while. That the dear doctor forgot to say," he laments.

Transient though life's pleasures may be, for Gopnik there has been for some decades now at least one enduring thread of joy and that is his feeling for New York.

He tells of the night he first fell in love with the city and adds, "Through it all that first feeling, on a night forty years ago, remains my major feeling: I am so pleased to be here that I can hardly believe I am." Fortunately, it's a pleasure that readers anywhere can share.

• Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments toMarjorie Kehe.

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