More Mystery than Mastery

Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work and the Meaning of Life

You can’t be faulted if you pick up Adam Gopnik’s book The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, because you want to learn about “mastery.” Who isn’t pursuing mastery in some area of their life? The slightly breathless jacket copy promises that The New Yorker staff writer Gopnik, one of the most acclaimed nonfiction writers of our time, will reveal the “common qualities and methods” of masters in magic, drawing, baking, dancing, and more, all on the way to teaching the reader “how mastery can happen in your own life.”

But this is no self-help book. Gopnik himself admits: “I realized, as I worked on these pages, that what I was writing was a self-help book that won’t help.” He’s right: there are no tips on becoming a master in your domain, no step-by-step plans to follow. If anything, the book is a testament to how stupefyingly, maddeningly difficult it is to master anything; to how much hard, repetitious work mastery requires; to how complicated it is to grasp what constitutes excellence in any field. If it’s a how-to book, it’s about how to come to term with how mysterious the pursuit of mastery really is.

The book is diffuse and sometimes a bit meandering ... but then it’s trying to pin down why the mystery of mastery is in fact the mystery of life. Gopnik discusses the mystery in seven “fables” that shed light on his subject, and then sprinkles amidst these chapters personal essays about his own attempts to pursue mastery: about learning to drive (and understand his father), about learning to bake with his aging mother, about learning to dance with his daughter, and—in a candid and surprising turn—learning how to conquer his own paruresis, or fear of urinating in public restrooms.¹

There is one pursuit of mastery that Gopnik really only mentions in asides: the mastery of writing. Perhaps he shies away from assessing his own primary pursuit of mastery, writing, suggesting that writing is a craft with which: “I am perpetually discontent, since I spy the difference between near perfection and perfection.” But let me not shy away from this assessment: this is a superbly written book, extremely satisfying at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, a master class in characterization, and, as a whole, a really sensitive and thoughtful reckoning with the very deepest questions of human existence.

A case in point: in the chapter devoted to his learning to drive as an adult, Gopnik takes a moment to consider the nature of his relationship with his father:

One way to calm myself [behind the wheel] was to become my calm father. Whenever I think of him, I am in the backseat and I see the back of his head, his mesh driving gloves, and his calm voice debating a topic with his children improbably crowded in behind him. (My first memories of life are in the Volkswagen Bug my parents bought in the late ‘50s, into whose tiny backseat they introduced, like clowns into a clown car, one child after another, until there were six.) To see him so is to do a terrible disservice to his accomplishments—a chauffeur is the last thing he was—and yet in another way it is to see him whole, if one translates the act of driving into an act of understated service. He thought little of doing a kind of drive-around of his six children and twelve grandchildren, now dispersed around the continent like pieces on a game board. From rural Ontario to Boston to Ann Arbor to Berkeley to Washington to New York—the driving would last fifteen or sixteen hours, and he would emerge, bearded and smiling. “I’ve never had an accident,” he liked to say. We were very close when I was a teenager, and I love him more for knowing that I was not remotely like him: he was sound, solid, in his role as a dean paterfamilias to a campus—all things I never hoped to be. My not driving was, in some sense, a response to his driving all the time. We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.

He had been driving, he often recalled, since he was twelve, as a young boy on a farm in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, his family, unusually, Jews among the Pennsylvania Dutch. He first drove an army-surplus jeep, used as a tractor, and at sixteen got his license. He often told me of how, as a teenager, having a car was the means not just to autonomy—though it was that: you could get behind the wheel and go to Atlantic City, to Provincetown, even to old Quebec—but to privacy. It enabled a lower-middle-class kid in a fractious, noisy extended family to be alone with his thoughts. He said to me once, when I was small, “You know, you can drive right across the country now without a stoplight.” The image stayed with me. (I suspect that the significant things we say to our children usually vanish, while incidental oddities linger.) I wanted to travel with him, but I left the driving to him.

Why, I wondered, had he never encouraged me to drive? Why had he not kept a car when I was a teenager? He gave me a driving lesson once—in Italy on a sabbatical leave, as it happened—and it had gone all right. But then he stopped, and he didn’t really have to; we didn’t have a car, that was true, but there were friends and rentals. If driving mattered so much to him, why would it not to me? Had he failed me in some way, or had I failed him in some way I was still not ready to recognize?

In this way, Gopnik intermingles memories of his father and deep questions about what we learn from parents—”Had he failed me ... or had I failed him”?—right into his account of learning the tactics of driving, thus illustrating that every pursuit of mastery is ultimately a consideration of the mystery of humanity.

I wrote earlier that this is not a how-to book. Let me revise that statement: perhaps it’s a how-to book about retaining your sanity while pursuing mastery, whether it be to learn sleight of hand, master realist art, bake good sourdough bread, drive a car, or—and this is where it hit close to home for me—write something, anything worthwhile. The pursuit of mastery is an endless quest; it involves a lifetime of striving, all done without any sense that “mastery” may even be reachable or that what you find to be mastery will count as mastery to anyone else.

It’s like pushing a rock up a hill, says Gopnik, invoking Albert Camus’s account of the myth of Sisyphus. The trick, writes Gopnik, is this: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because while the only kind of action we can attempt may be illusory, a stone rolled up a hill only to roll down again, the happiness it gives us is not. Sisyphus is right to be happy with his work. It’s what he’s got. It’s what we have. In a doomed, fatal, mortal world, we are all Sisyphus rolling stones, but we are also aware of the possibility of contentment as we do, not because the stone won’t roll back (eventually, it will), but because when it does—and this is the secret, hopeful side to the curse that the gods gave Sisyphus—it doesn’t actually crush us. It just gives us the work to do again.” It’s in sections like this where it becomes clear that Gopnik is exploring not just how to pursue mastery but how to live in a world where meaning is elusive. In such a world, one must simply keep trying.

Happily.

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Every essay is a conversation with others. In this case, I’ve been inspired by

Ashley Mark Adkins

and

Ed

and

David E. Perry

and

Sam Kahn

and

Ross Bentley

and

Michael Wenberg

… and of course

Adam Gopnik

.

1. I’m no prude, but I was momentarily surprised when Gopnik took on this “undignified” subject matter … and yet somehow Gopnik uses the lowly subject to demonstrate that one can seek mastery even over the basest functions.