A tale of two fixations: The writer has a jones for my native country. I have a jones for his take on it.

When I first moved to the United States I quickly got hooked on Adam Gopnik’s Paris Journal in The New Yorker. Gopnik, who was the magazine’s correspondent in Paris from 1994 to 2000, understood France better than the French. What I cherished about his writing was that the chronicle of his life in the city was devoid of clichés. Paris was his mistress, but he was aware of her flaws and wrote about them with humor, not acrimony. “France was a hard romance to sustain…when almost everybody else thought that Paris was going straight to hell,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir, Paris to the Moon, which compiles most of his Paris Journal essays.

Gopnik brought to French culture what Woody Allen brought to Hollywood: a breath of much-needed fresh air. So when Gopnik, his wife Martha and their two children moved back to New York in 2000, I almost felt betrayed. On a recent afternoon I sat and talked with 50-year-old Adam Gopnik over iced tea when he stopped in San Francisco on a book tour. His latest offering, The King in the Window, is a children’s fantasy tale set on his old turf, Paris. His hero, Oliver Parker, is a lonely 12-year-old boy, born in New York City but raised in Paris from the age of three. “Paris was his home, although he didn’t always feel quite at home there,” writes Gopnik. Oliver quite inadvertently becomes the king of an army of wraiths whose mission is to save the world (with a little help from Molière and Racine) from evil forces that are stealing people’s minds.

King in the Window made me almost forgive Gopnik for abandoning Paris for New York, leaving Rue du Pré-aux-Clercs for the Upper East Side. Gopnik still spends summers in Paris, where he did most of his writing for this book to make sure it would have, in his own words, an “appellation d’origine contrôlée.” And listening to Gopnik talk about his French addiction made me realize that he’s hardly on the path to recovery. Take Neige, for instance, the beautiful heroine of the book, who fascinates Oliver as much as she exasperates him and who, “like most French girls smiled only when there was something really worth smiling about.” She calls American tourists “stupider than cattle marching to the slaughter”; Oliver in return describes France as a moldy old country. “Neige represents the intelligence and culture of French life,” says Gopnik, obviously still under the influence.

But the Paris of his latest book is far from the romantic Paris to which writers have accustomed us. The book is set in winter, when “it is dark and cold and sad and mysterious.” Says the author, “One of the images that haunted me and I wanted to put into words was of Paris in the winter. Because, of course, the Paris [of] clichés, or even the great Paris of the Impressionists, is a sunshine Paris. And for me the Paris I saw most often and that filled my life was cold and gray.”

Gopnik’s affair with France dates back to 1973, when he spent a year in Paris with his parents and five siblings. Two decades later, after a stint as The New Yorker’s art critic, he convinced the publication to send him back to his first love. His Paris Journal was born.

Last August, after France turned down the European Union constitution and lost its bid to host the 2012 Olympics, Gopnik published a piece in The New Yorker questioning whether Paris was in crisis. When I asked him about this in October, Gopnik, like an addict who won’t face reality, admitted that he didn’t want to believe in a crisis. “I was just stunned that everywhere I turned, on the left, on the right and in the middle, among literary people, among philosophical people, all of them, without exception, were saying, ‘This is a real crisis’ [or] ‘We are in a prerevolutionary situation. It can’t go on like this, le blocage de la société is too deep.’ I hope it’s not true.”

As for the capital’s suburban uprising a month later, he feels it’s the kind of unrest that erupts from conditions of social and political marginalization—hardly an intifada—and compares it to the situation of African-Americans in the 1960s. He believes France needs a type of affirmative action.

“I would like to see a new wave of optimism and self-confidence and belief in France,” he says, “and I think all the resources are there.” Gopnik is obviously not cured.

Adam according to Adam

1956 - Born in Philadelphia to two 20-year-old graduate students determined to remake American intellectual life by taking over the universities through sheer numbers: They have six children in less than 10 years, all of whom get PhDs, save Adam.