FROM PARIS TO THE MOON.

• Author: Starr, Alexandra
• Position: Review

FROM PARIS TO THE MOON by Adam Gopnik Random House, $24.95

PARIS HAS HELD A MAGNETIC PULL over Americans; personalities ranging from Henry James to Molly Ringwald have decamped to the City of Lights and made it their home. Following in that tradition, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik spent five years on the other side of the Atlantic, holding forth on subjects rang from the idiosyncrasies of French gyms to the bedtime stories he told his son. Now he has published most of his Parisian-centric essays and a handful of diary entries in a collection entitled From Paris to the Moon. While the writing occasionally tends towards the sentimental and slightly-too-personal, the book nevertheless provides ample ammunition for the argument that Gopnik is one of the finest bellelettrists working today.

Take his disquisition on the World Cup. Gopnik set himself the task of watching a month's worth of soccer games, in an effort to ascertain why it is that the rest of the world loves a sport that many Americans will only watch at gunpoint. At first he is a reluctant spectator. "Things start off briskly," Gopnik observes of the tournaments, "and then fritter away into desultory shin kicking, like a Wall Street Journal editorial" Near the end of his self-imposed viewing marathon, however, Gopnik has a Road-to-Damascus revelation--soccer isn't meant to be a spectacle, or a temporary escape from life. Rather it is life, with all of its injustice and tedium. "We seek unfair advantage, celebrate tiny moments of pleasure as though they were final victories, score goals for the wrong side," he writes. "The World Cup is a festival of fate: man accepting his hard circumstances, the near certainty of his failure"

The soccer essay is vintage Gopnik, but perhaps the most accomplished piece in this collection is his investigation of the Maurice Papon trial. As a functionary in the Vichy regime, Papon was responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz; half a century later he was tried for his complicity in their deaths. First Gopnik fixes his eye on his fellow journalists, who have come from around the world to cover the event. He readily picks out his American colleagues from the mob. "[R]umpled and exhausted before the day begins, [they] seem to be still longing for Vietnam," he observes. "Even walking up and down the steps of the palais, they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible...