Editorial Content for The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

Because he’s so competent at his profession, it’s hard to picture longtime New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik lacking skill at anything. Perhaps that’s what makes his latest book, THE REAL WORK, so intriguing. In a dozen erudite essays distinguished by his characteristically elegant style, Gopnik interrogates aspects of the subject of mastery by immersing himself in a variety of pursuits --- from baking to boxing --- to produce what he modestly calls “a self-help book that won’t help.” Nonetheless, it might allow his readers to “better see yourself as a self, a constructed self, made out of appetites turned into accomplishments.”

The title of Gopnik’s book comes from the term magicians use to describe the “accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.” Unsurprisingly, he devotes considerable attention to that immersive subject. He hangs out with sleight-of-hand master Jamy Ian Swiss, “a master of the mystery of performance, of the way that misdirection is not merely a magician’s tool but a kind of permanent principle of human psychology.” And he visits with illusionist David Blaine while reflecting on the mystery behind the terrifying stunt of catching a bullet in one’s teeth. “[T]he trick to the bullet catch is catching the bullet,” he writes.

"There’s no dispute that Adam Gopnik has mastered the art of eloquent, informative prose, something that’s manifest in this gently encouraging book."

Gopnik’s journeys into other realms are equally absorbing. Possessed of a graduate degree in art history himself and a working art critic, he recognizes that despite the enjoyment he derives from drawing, his skill is modest at best. He apprentices himself to Jacob Collins, an artist well-known for his work in the classical realist style, who is gentle with Gopnik’s feelings of “helplessness and stupidity and impotence that I had not experienced since elementary school.” Collins helpfully imparts some of the tricks of the artist’s craft, like seeing a “snooty butler” in the chest of Gopnik’s first nude model and simply drawing that.

But Gopnik doesn’t limit himself to the field of performance or the arts. In one entertaining chapter, he describes learning how to drive in the mayhem of New York City traffic at the same time as his 20-year-old son. He’s aided by a colorful instructor whose tips for surviving in the city’s traffic --- as he cheerfully tosses out terms like the “noodle” and the “bee” --- allow Gopnik, as his comfort on the road slowly grows, to see how driving “was in another way civilization itself: self-organizing, self-controlling, a pattern of agreement and coalition made at high speed and, on the whole, successfully.”

In one of the volume’s most personal entries, Gopnik describes his painful, decades-long struggle with paruresis --- the inability to urinate in public spaces --- and his decision to try to overcome it. With the aid of a therapist who himself once suffered from the phobia, Gopnik traverses New York City on his bicycle (in the process acclimating himself to an activity far more perilous than the one he would do almost anything to avoid), seeking out restrooms where he can work to master his affliction.

Interspersed with these personal experiences are sections, seven in all, grouped under the heading the “Mysteries of Mastery.” In these, Gopnik detours into more subtle aspects of his subject --- among them, the murky provenance of S. W. Erdnase’s The Expert at the Card Table, “the holy volume of modern magic.” One of the most moving is his exploration of the mystery of music. He ponders this “most amazing” of mysteries --- how we “first take sound and turn it into music, and then take music and turn it into meaning.” In that chapter, he draws on his experience as a librettist to consider some of the challenges of collaboration, observing that “without enchantment, music and words mean nothing.”

Gopnik closes with an account that marries his shadowboxing lessons in a Queens gym with the dancing instruction he undertakes alongside a daughter with whom his relationship is loving but at times prickly. Here, he discourses on everything from his admiration for Benny Leonard, the famous Jewish lightweight from a century ago, to the role of masculinity in the work of writers like Hemingway, Mailer and Fitzgerald. He brings his exploration full circle, linking driving, dancing, boxing and drawing to “form a permanent human rhythm, heartbeat-bound, of small actions building bigger blocks.” And he concludes with a lovely scene of him dancing with his daughter one evening in the depths of the COVID pandemic on the esplanade above Central Park’s Wollman Rink, as he realizes that “the real work is what we do for other people.”

In a reassuring summing-up, Gopnik writes that “we can do some things badly and still feel good about having done them, and some things well and still feel badly about not doing them better. Equilibrium of the mind is achieved by doing both.” THE REAL WORK is a worthy bookend to Tom Vanderbilt’s BEGINNERS: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, whose middle-aged author launched himself into a variety of tasks like singing and surfing, seeking to achieve at least a basic level of competence. There’s no dispute that Adam Gopnik has mastered the art of eloquent, informative prose, something that’s manifest in this gently encouraging book.