Through the Children’s Gate
By Adam Gopnik
Quercus £17.99, 318 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

There is the New York that every tourist knows – Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge – and then there is the belief system that every resident of the city instinctively signs up to. If you imagine this New York as a psychological grid, then the big avenues stand for the positive ideas the city revolves around: meritocracy and multiculturalism, ambition and intelligence. The smaller cross-streets represent the neuroses that have now been exported to the rest of the world’s big cities, from parental obsessiveness to our fixation with home redesign and gentrification.

Adam Gopnik, who writes for The New Yorker, explores this Freudian cityscape on his return to New York after five years in Paris. His take on this new gilded age is both acute and funny not just because he has been away, but also because he returns with two children, Luke and Olivia.

Luke’s responses to 9/11 and the justifications for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not unlike our own vulnerability to the logic of finishing this threat off by having a war somewhere else. “Like, if there’s a war, they have no chance, right? Our army is bigger than their army,” he says before being reassured that America, rather than the terrorists, can “choose where to have the war”.

Going trick or treating with the kids on Hallowe’en, among the brownstone houses that the very rich in Manhattan inhabit, is a window on our obsession with home design. In another age, adults would admire the costumes the children wear. In New York, Hallowe’en has become an opportunity to admire other people’s fancy homes.

A neighbour’s almost hysterical complaints about the noise from Gopnik’s children running in the apartment (even though they were in bed at the time) makes the writer reflect that “noise in New York is ... a symbol, a referred pain, for something else. The anger comes from elsewhere, even if (as they claim and we refute at length) the noise comes from upstairs.” This may sound a very domestic drama, but because it is New York, and because it is Gopnik, the book seems like a series of wise parables.

At three years old, Olivia had an imaginary friend with a difference – they “grab” lunch together. He has an assistant. “Why, as Olivia had seen so clearly, are grown-ups ... so busy and so obsessed with the language of busyness that it dominates their conversation?” That is just one of the questions Gopnik poses in this metropolitan whirl.

Rahul Jacob is the FT’s travel editor.