by JULIET WATERS

Adam Gopnik is best known for his hilarious, erudite essays in The New Yorker and for his bestseller, Paris To the Moon. In 2000, after five years of raising young kids in France, Gopnik and his wife decided to move back to New York City. Just as they were getting used to lower crime and fast-paced gentrification, there was 9/11. From this cultural alchemy of privilege, terror and renewal, Gopnik has written a loving but clear-eyed tribute to his adopted city. Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York is where Gopnik declares himself, once and for all, a New Yorker.

Sitting in the bar of the Ritz Carlton, a few hours before a reading at Concordia, however, Gopnik seems an awful lot like a Montrealer. His pre-teen son, Luke, is upstairs watching a replay of the Grey Cup. The highlight of their weekend was hockey at the Bell Centre. And I have to work to detach Gopnik from a conversation about the demise of the Expos, where he’s even ready to defend the Big O. True, I fired this up by challenging his theory that the Yankees are the new Expos. (C’mon! The Yankees are the new Habs. The Mets are the new Expos!) But as we talk, it’s dawning on me all the ways in which New York is becoming the new Montreal.

Montrealers have always known a major city where people lived comfortably near the downtown core, but as Gopnik explains, “I did a documentary for the BBC this summer. We went all over New York with a camera crew, and one of the things I kept wanting to talk about was this unbelievable transformation... If you had said to someone in 1980 or ’79, when we [Gopnik and his wife] came down from Montreal, that within 25 years New York will be one of the safer places in all of North America, Harlem will be gentrified and it will be filled with families, and if anything the social problem will be too many strollers in too many spaces, no one would have believed you. I don’t mean they would have thought you were optimistic. It just wasn’t credible. Cities were dying.”

Gopnik, however, has been primed for this. He grew up across the street from the Ritz, in the Chateau Apartment. Still, he’s no stranger to urban tension. His father, a McGill professor, was a “total believer in public schools.” As a result, he went to high school “all the way the fuck up on Côte-des-Neiges. Behind the Côte-des-Neiges Plaza. The only public school here was the High School of Montreal, which was a really terrible school—I went there for a year and it was really quite awful. So I went to Northmount, which was the next closest.”

Getting Gopnik to talk about his lousy English Montreal public school education turns out to be a little harder than getting him to talk about the Expos. “This is really boring,” he insists. Knowing this bit about Gopnik’s background, however, explains a lot about his slightly skewered, doggedly liberal, insider/outsider take on America’s intellectually and culturally privileged classes. His father did, it turns out, offer him the choice of going to a better French school, but Gopnik declined, “which was stupid in retrospect.” It might have made things easier when he moved to France.

Gopnik’s version of stupid, however, may in fact be the secret of his writing. Would his essays be half as entertaining if he followed every one else’s idea of smart? In his latest book, his ageing German Jew psychoanalyst offers this brusque review of his work: “You showed independence of mind, and, as always, very poor judgement.” Whether this move back to New York fits that pattern remains to be seen, but will no doubt remain a great source of great essays.

Through The Children’s Gate by Adam Gopnik Knopf, hc, 318pp, $34.95