Daily Blague

Real tears am I weeping, having just learned that Adam Gopnik's piece about a dead pet fish, in the 4 July 2005 issue of the magazine that he writes for, is not on line! So you must buy the magazine yourself, if you don't already get it, and make sure to be the first person in the house who reads it.

Humanity being what it is, there are intelligent people who will argue that their loathing of Adam Gopnik's writing can be supported by cogent argument. I know what's driving them nuts: this is work that stands the idea of "substance" on its head. Beethoven famously denounced Mozart's Così fan tutte as a waste of ravishing music upon an unworthy plot. But Beethoven was wrong, awfully - as he usually was in matters relating to wit. We are learning that the things that our grandfathers regarded as "important" are really cardboard constructs unworthy of the time of day. I myself am completely prostrated by the virtuosity of "Death of a Fish," which relates events occurring not six months ago, in convenient journalistic style, but at the beginning of June 2005, which as of this writing is still the present month. The crazing of allusion and significance that distinguishes Mr Gopnik's essays in general, and this one - which really is about how his family handled the strange death of a pet betta - in particular, from the efforts of rude and unfinished littérateurs is manifest in the uncannily nimble invocation of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as a catechism for dealing with suddenly bereft children. Who'd a thunk it?

The fish dies because it finds an unintended channel in the Disneyland castle that Mr Gopnik has bought for it as compensation for his daughter's being littler than his son. The fish gets stuck in a window of its castle - a misadventure that summons hilariious changes on the bells of Manhattan real estate - and dies. How to tell little Olivia? I suspect that Mr Gopnick has devoted a leetle more attention to figuring out how to tell us about the death of Bluie over the past twenty days. The breathtaking aspect of the essay, though, is the sudden maturity of Luke, the son who is now ten, but who used to have an imaginary friend, invented to compensate for his parents' addiction to telephonic filofaxing, named Charlie Ravioli. Charlie Ravioli was never available for meetings; your girl called his girl. This was a child's imaginary friend. Albeit a New Yorker child. Moi, I would not not have reported, in "Death of a Fish," that my precocious son called his fish "Django," a name that Luke could not possibly have discovered on his own (let us hope; it would almost certainly involve the smoking of cigarettes). Was it really so long ago, the Charlie Ravioli piece? Undoubtedly; children are fast.

Update! Ahem. As my dear Kathleen has pointed out in the comments, Charlie Ravioli was Olivia Gopnik's invention, not her brother's. That's what I get for writing late and not checking things out. Olivia is some little girl!