Random Reader

Every week, at the front of the New York Times Book Review, a well-known author is interviewed. One of the standard questions asked is what writer(s) would you like to ask for dinner. If, in an alternate universe, I was a well-known author, my answer to this would unhesitatingly be Adam Gopnik. I can't think of a more entertaining or pleasant dinner companion.

Whether it's something he's just learned about or something he's just thought of, Gopnik applies his vast store of arcane knowledge and his intelligence to look at it in a new and interesting way. Tempered with personal insights and opinion, he then shares it in a humble, often humorous, manner. While he obviously cares deeply about his subjects and has a clear ethical stance, he is never strident or stodgy; his touch is always light and amusing. As one British reviewer put it, his writing is "a stroll into the not-yet-known or only just-thought about", with stroll being the operative word.

Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker and his August 8, 2011 essay on dogs – "Dog Story: How did the dog become our master" – epitomizes his technique and style. He starts with a personal anecdote, told with self-deprecating humour. His ten-year-old daughter has conned him and his wife into getting her a dog despite their many misgivings. Gopnik falls prey to the charms of the puppy and becomes fascinated with its behaviour, as well as his own reaction. This leads to all sorts of questions and trains of thought.

Dogs are descended from wolves. How and why did wolves begin to associate with humans? When did wolves become dogs? Why do we have such differing expectations of the human-dog relationship? What do dogs think, if they even do? Why do dogs behave the way they do? Do dogs have emotions or are we anthropomorphising? Gopnik lets us follow his intense reading and research, careful to mention titles and authors in case readers want to explore further on their own.

But then – and this is the quintessence of Gopnikism – he goes on to raise quite deep issues and to answer them using his own powers of reasoning and moral judgement. Should we treat animals as equals? What does our relationship with dogs teach us about ourselves and our place in the world?

This same pattern is used in his books. Paris to the Moon describes his five years in Paris (1995 – 2000) with his wife and baby son, as he learns to navigate a foreign city and a new role as parent. Sparked by the 200th anniversary of the common birthday of Lincoln and Darwin, Gopnik argues in Angels and Ages that the two shared more than a February 12, 1809 birthdate. Both men were exemplars of the change in thought that marked modern times, with argument based on reason and observation rather than faith or tradition, and with the belief that a sound argument, be it for evolution or emancipation, would win out in the end. Winter: Five Windows on the Season is a beautiful meditation on the season of winter and its interaction with culture and science, while The Table Comes First is an exploration of the pleasures of eating, of the shared experiences of preparing and consuming food and of talking around and about the table.

Which brings me back to my original point. Reading Adam Gopnik is like having a fascinating conversation with a literate and entertaining good friend while sharing a meal and a glass of wine. You go home thinking "Wow, what a wonderful evening".

Over the holidays, I read two books which commented interestingly on contemporary class issues. Where'd You Go, Bernadette was a funny look at family life in urban, educated upper-middle-class America. The divide between this group and the rural working-class is just one of the themes that Barbara Kingsolver tackles in Flight Behavior.

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is terrific social satire. Her target is the computer rich of Seattle. These are bright over-achievers with good hearts and best intentions but living in a very limited world. Bernadette Fox is a very intelligent stay-at-home mom married to Elgie Branch, a Microsoft guru. Their 15-year-old daughter, Bee, is the narrator of the book. Her tale is fleshed out with various documents provided by a neighbour, Audrey Griffin. Bee has aced her school year at her private school and is claiming her reward of a family trip to Antarctica. This becomes more and more problematical for Bernadette, a severe agoraphobe who already relies on a personal assistant out-sourced in India.

This book is fun and witty. Some of the humour comes from the sarcastic dialogue between Bernadette and Bee which I found reminiscent of the TV show Gilmore Girls. Much is derived from situations – for example, a dispute between Bernadette and Audrey over blackberry bushes or the machinations of Soo-Lin Lee-Segal, a friend of Audrey's and an administrative assistant to Elgie. Semple gets everything right. Just look at the little detail of the married women's names – they have "kept" their maiden names or hyphenated with their husband's.

As Bernadette edges closer to a breakdown, Elgie decides to stage an intervention with disastrous results. Bernadette disappears. Bee is certain her mother would never abandon her permanently and insists on looking for her. In the process, she learns much about Bernadette's past and the reasons for her neuroses. Semple avoids a one-dimensional skewering by keeping true to her main theme of love surviving personal and family dysfunction.

Flight Behavior tackles much broader issues and is a much more serious book (although it has its lighter moments). Organisms and environment are geared to each other. When they no longer mesh, when one or both has changed, then the organism must leave and/or change to survive. This is the theme Kingsolver examines on both a personal and environmental scale.

Her protagonist is Dellarobia Turnbow. Very bright, she and her best friend, Dovey, are determined to leave their tiny town in the Tennessee mountains. However, Dellarobia becomes accidentally pregnant at 17 and marries the father, Cub Turnbow. Although she miscarries, her own parents are dead and dying and she remains with Cub on his parents' sheep farm. She is now 27 with two children, Preston and Cordelia, who she loves deeply but she is bored out of her mind with her life and her husband.

At the start of the novel, a desperate Dellarobia is climbing the hill behind her and Cub's house to finally consummate her flirtation with the "telephone man" when she finds the mountain valley covered with a brilliant orange glow. The myopic Dellarobia thinks it is some sort of sign for her to change her ways and her life. What it turns out to be is most of the monarch butterfly population of North America which has been forced out of its traditional wintering ground in Mexico because of flooding caused by climate change and clearcutting. But it is indeed a sign.

Cub's father had been planning to log the valley to pay a bank loan but news of the butterflies' presence delays this. Pastor Bobby Ogle, who leads the Turnbows' church, sees them as a sign of God's grace while the media see an opportunity for a story. Various people with varying agendas start showing up – protestors,"knitting womyn," eco-tourists, scientists. Dellarobia befriends Ovid Byron, a leading expert on monarchs, who sets up shop on the farm bringing in a team of graduate students to study the butterflies over the winter.

Dellarobia's interest in the monarchs starts with attempts to answer her science-minded son Preston's questions but she eventually ends up as a paid assistant to the researchers. "Her life was unfolding into something larger by the day, like one of those rectangular gas-station maps...." However, despite her attraction to the intellectual stimulus they provide, Dellarobia is sensitive to "the condescension of outsiders" and their utter blindness to the realities of rural working-class life. One of the funniest instances of this is the pledge one of the activists is urging the locals to sign – asking people to recycle when they shop at secondhand stores because it's all they can afford, or to reduce their carbon footprint by not flying when they rarely make it to the neighbouring town.

Kingsolver is sharply critical of the scientists for not making clear how desperate the environmental situation is, for assuming that people won't understand what they are saying. They need to speak directly to people and not rely on a tainted media. However, through Ovid, she says it is already too late; to use her analogy, we are at the top of Niagara Falls without a paddle. For us, as for the butterflies, it becomes a question of whether we can adapt to a new earth. Like Dellarobia, we must look the facts squarely in the eye so we can make the correct choices.