Raising kids in NYC, where even an imaginary friend has a personal assistant

"Through the

Children's Gate:

A Home in New York"

by Adam Gopnik

Knopf, 318 pp., $25

The choice to raise children in New York City seems unlikely, until you realize, as Adam Gopnik observes in his exuberant new book, that a growing number of people are doing it. Families have returned to Manhattan — and have helped transform the city's image and character.

"Through the Children's Gate," titled after one of the entrances to Central Park, is Gopnik's follow-up to his celebrated best-seller, "Paris to the Moon," about living in France. A staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, Gopnik returned to New York with his wife and two small children in fall 2000 and began to see the city anew through the eyes and experiences of his kids.

His impressions are also honed by his having lived abroad. When his 5-year-old son complains about the teachers in America being "too nice," praising him even when he made mistakes, Gopnik writes, "Nothing in France — nothing in life — had prepared him for the embrace of American progressive education."

New York is not the city of Gopnik's young adulthood. It has largely shed its seedy image of 25 years ago when violent crime was rife and Times Square, among other places, was sleazy and rundown.

The increased presence of families, Gopnik notes somewhat wistfully, has contributed to the "suburbanization of New York." Stroller congestion. Park playgrounds filled to capacity. Children everywhere.

"Through the Children's Gate" is loosely organized, suiting Gopnik's wonderfully eclectic range of interests, not necessarily related to his family. A noise dispute with neighbors in his apartment building becomes a meditation on urban sounds. He writes movingly of his friendship with Kirk Varnedoe, top curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who is dying of colon cancer. This book will make you look differently at parrots and want to buy the jazz album "Village Vanguard Sessions."

Occasionally Gopnik succumbs to the New Yorker's tendency — compulsion? — toward city-aggrandizement, threatening to undermine the otherwise pleasurable urbanity of his tale. It's a wonder how a writer of Gopnik's gifts can write a sentence like this: "Having [children] in New York is just like having them anywhere else, only more so."

Also irksome is the mostly unexamined privilege and self-absorption of the un-landed gentry of the city. "Each class seems beautifully devised," he rhapsodizes about his kids' private school, "a core of creative people's children, a sampling of richer children, a frosting of minorities."

But these are a few nettles in a field of flowers. Gopnik's riffs on his children are some of the best writing on parenthood I've read, by turns poignant, funny and wise. His 3-year-old daughter's imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli, is so busy he has a personal assistant. He joins his son in wild rooting for the Yankees in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.

Here's a sure sign of a good read: by the time you reach the last third of Gopnik's book, you may still wonder at his broaching yet another apparently random, idiosyncratic topic, but you now entirely trust where the writer will take you.