The idea – first proposed by the Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers (2008) – that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is all it takes to excel in your chosen field has become something of a secular credo. Its central premiss, that the genius of Beethoven or Michelangelo can be broken down into its constituent achievements, is one of those apparently egalitarian arguments that turn out, on the contrary, to be an excellent way of ruining it for all concerned, apart from the authors of popular books on how to get better at everything.
Adam Gopnik’s tenth full-length work of nonfiction – he is also a staff writer at the New Yorker – is not unreceptive to this way of thinking. The Real Work is his meditation on the disciplines he wishes, as a cultured, well-to-do Manhattanite in late middle age, he had put in the hours to master, from drawing to driving and, climactically, ballroom dancing, which he conceives of as “a rich and flowing activity broken down … into component parts”, reassembled by the dancer into a flow that is “never really a flow but a thing built up of limitless smaller frames, until, played rapidly, it gave the illusion of continuous movement”. The analogy is one Gopnik returns to frequently, to the extent that it might be considered the book’s big idea, as applicable to strudel-making as to the foxtrot: “mastery happens small step by small step”, and“the mystery, more often than not, is that of a kind of life-enhancing equivalent of the illusion called ‘persistence of motion’ when we watch a movie or cartoon”.
The risk, as with Gladwell, is reductiveness – the sort of deadening utilitarian urge, endemic to the “smart-thinking” section of the bookshop, to pop the hood on human expressiveness and examine its moving parts. What insures Gopnik against such charges is the ease of his essayistic manner in absorbing uncertainties. For all the faith their author places in the gospel of incremental achievement, the thirteen essays and vignettes that comprise The Real Work are simultaneously open to a much less mechanistic view of great accomplishment, content, mostly, to leave the magic intact. Gopnik’s title comes from magicians’ shop talk: “the real work” refers to “the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery” that marks the difference between a dumb card trick and an illusion that takes our breath away. “The real work is what makes a magic effect magical.” In his third chapter, “Making Magic”, Gopnik shadows the close-up card magician Jamy Ian Swiss and, in examining the philosophical gulf between meticulous traditionalists such as Swiss and purveyors of raw, crowd-pleasing sensationalism like David Blaine, he gives the best account I have ever read of the epistemics of magic: how the master magician exploits the narrowness of our imaginations, how “routinized” we are “in our theories of the world”, to lull us into participating in our own bewilderment. That he does so without revealing Swiss’s methods – “exposure” being a “hanging crime in the magic world” – is testament to Gopnik’s own legerdemain, his skill in particularizing the abstract without ever quite falsifying its mysteriousness.
His first effort at self-improvement comes after he meets an artist at a dinner party. As the New Yorker’s former art critic, Gopnik had long regretted his inability to practise what he criticized. “I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet”, he confesses. “Could one write about art with no idea how to draw?” His beat, it was true, had been the kind of conceptual art that mostly “stored life drawing away in the attic”, but in older age Gopnik finds himself drawn to the figurative, to “pure craft, unalloyed accuracy”. His dinner-party companion turns out to be the “real hardass” he was looking for: Jacob Collins, a successful neo-realist painter who walks the delicately revanchist line between classicism – Collins believes that art started to go wrong with Édouard Manet – and “reactionary grievance-keeping”. It is his project to revive atelier realism without succumbing to sentimentality or stodginess. Under Collins’s tutelage Gopnik learns to see the model in his life-drawing class not as a “symbol set” of arms and legs and chest, but as an agglomeration of what he actually sees, shapes as he subjectively perceives them, the “snooty-looking butler” in the space beneath the model’s breastbone, the “kind of hamster with soft rabbit ears where his shoulder joined his arm”. And so life drawing is shown to be like every other discipline, on the one hand a methodical, “slow carpentering of fragments into the illusion of a harmonious whole”, and on the other a capitulation to instinct, an effort of attentional focus that is also a species of relinquishment.
One of the most pleasing aspects of The Real Work is its resistance to formula. The chapter on drawing is a corker, but, rather than repeat the essentially televisual, eager-student shtick that a glance at the contents page might forebode, the rest of the book grants itself the freedom to follow its nose, allowing subtle changes in authorial position, from participant to observer to memoirist, as Gopnik brushes up on his driving, baking and boxing. The result is something closer to an informal treatise than to a series of discrete investigations. In the baking chapter Gopnik’s wife, Martha, suggests he apprentices himself to his mother, Myrna, a retired college professor and whiz at Poilâne bread and the Montreal bagel. “Someone who yells at you a lot and teaches you what’s what”, says Martha. “You know. Every writer does that now.” The affectionate tilt at the likes of Heat (2006) by Bill Buford is unmistakable: Gopnik is at pains to distinguish his book from the fish-out-of-water school of immersive journalism. It is at once more interior and idiosyncratic than that. The author is especially acute on the phenomenology of physical activity, noting, for example, that the world’s most popular sport requires us, as bipedal apes evolutionarily disposed to use our hands, “to learn a set of skills that are antithetical, or at least at right angles, to our physiology”. Soccer is popular because “it evens out our skills into the thing we’re less naturally good at”. Both boxing and the foxtrot entail a similar reversal of expectation:
The irony was that in boxing action was essentially defensive – you were always retreating from the enemy who does not exist or exists only in your mind – while it was in dancing that you had to assert yourself, step forward, lead. The combat sport was most wisely pursued from something close to a state of defensive paranoia; the social grace was best pursued as a series of aggressive actions.
Likewise, in the chapter on driving Gopnik mounts a brilliant contrarian defence of the car, for all the havoc it has wreaked on the environment, as a pillar of civilization: driving is “self-organising, self-controlling, a pattern of agreement and coalition made at high speed”. It is “the essential social contract made at forty miles an hour”.
Elsewhere he expands his analysis of mastery to embrace its opposite. In a late chapter, “Relieving”, he characterizes the confounding psychology of his paruresis, or inability to pee in public places, as “a kind of black-mass parody of accomplishment”. Again the solution lies somewhere between increased focus and letting go. Or as Arturo, Gopnik’s excitable driving instructor, puts it: “Become the noodle!”. By which he means something like: concentrate and relax. If this stands as the book’s abiding principle, the motto it flies on its banner, then it is closely followed by the case it makes for imperfection. In magic, the “Too Perfect theory” states that if a trick is seamless, it will have a bathetic effect on the viewer. A cigarette passed through a quarter can have only one explanation: the quarter is a fake, with a hinge. A successful trick relies not on astounding the viewer, but on planting any number of possible solutions in their mind. “Magic”, as Gopnik puts it in one of his many elegant formulations, “is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects.” And so it is with any art. “Expressiveness is error … the vital sign of a human hand.” CGI can never move us as much as a pianist’s rubato, Ella Fitzgerald’s warble or Caravaggio’s pentimenti, the instabilities that only betray their humanity. “We need evident imperfection in order to be perfectly impressed.”
The Real Work is very nearly perfectly impressive. One might object that Adam Gopnik is at times a little deaf to his privilege: the book might have been subtitled “What to Do with Your Ample Free Time When You’re a Staffer at the New Yorker Who Summers in Cape Cod”. But expressiveness is error, and to grumble too much would be to undervalue this beautifully written, epigrammatic, penetratingly intelligent book, whose mastery lies in the light but certain grip it maintains on ambiguity.
Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: The risks and rewards of stepping back from the world, 2021
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