Childhood in New York

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate is the best book about parenting I have ever read. That may not have been his aim; Through the Children's Gate is Gopnik's follow-up to the best-selling Paris to the Moon, which warmly described the pleasures—especially the gastronomic ones—of fin-de-siecle Paris. In that book the kids were a bit of an afterthought, and here the focus is in part on how families have changed New York City, driving out the hipsters, the criminals, and the artsy demi-monde. But along the way Gopnik drops one apparently casual observation after another on the challenges and rewards of child-rearing.

The book, like Paris to the Moon a collection of Gopnik's New Yorker articles pieced together with excerpts from yearly holiday journals, is sometimes uneven. A few chapters, notably the one on parrots and switch hotels, feel out of place. But there are utterly memorable scenes from the lives of his children: his daughter's hyper-busy imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli; a famous art historian who spends the last summer of his life coaching a youth football team called the Giant Metrozoids; Gopnik's effort to communicate with his son through the language of electronic media. The chapters seem to get better as the book progresses, as his children grow up and develop interesting personalities of their own.

A Room with No View

Emma Donoghue's Room is not a novel for claustrophobes. Half the book takes place in an 11x11 room populated only by a five-year-old boy and his mother. The boy, Jack, is not fully aware of the horror of their circumstances, thanks to his mother's tender and herculean efforts to create an environment rich in language, music, games, and stories. The fact that through Jack's eyes his childhood appears almost idyllic is deeply disturbing to the reader.

To say much about the book's second half risks ruining some genuinely heart-pounding pages, but the family does escape the Room. Once they have reached what Jack refers to as “Outside,” however, both he and his mother have serious trouble adapting to freedom and the real world. Jack is overwhelmed by the sensuous richness of modern life, and perversely missses the intimacy of the Room. His mother, meanwhile, is hounded to despair by judgmental relatives and the media.

Room is a painful book, at times almost unbearably so, but it is also a touching portrait of maternal love. It raises all kinds of questions about the nature of appearance and reality and the ability of the psyche to withstand suffering. There are hilarious moments when Jack's five-year-old mind exposes the limits and absurdities of the English language. It is an enthralling novel, as much a page-turner as Donoghue's Slammerkin (historical fiction about a murderous prostitute in eighteenth-century England), but one that achieves an unusual and haunting depth.