Winter's Tale
Helprin, Mark
WINTER'S TALE Mark Helprin / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $14.95 Eric Goldstein It would be nice to be able to praise Mark Helprin's fiction. At a time when so many American authors are either...
...Both write as if the truths they are concerned with are not available to minds that submit to strict veracity...
...Although these fantastic images further Helprin's vision of a wondrous world, they do not pull their weight...
...Helprin is a writer of great ambition and some talent...
...The hero is an I'll-try-any-thing sort in an anything-can-happen town, and the result is a topsy-turvy romp in the New World...
...But whether you take it as a spiritual journey or simply as entertainment, the novel does not fly...
...Fantasy elements fit the context of the larger-than-life tale told in Helprin's first novel, Refiner s Fire...
...These cute fellers say "meshugah" a lot, one after the other, and are given to linking arms and dancing across the bridge to Manhattan: "They block traffic completely, and sometimes they lose themselves in the dancing...
...The cables stretch and zing, the towers start to bend, and the roadway gets like a rubber whip...
...There is an enormous chamber of nude women glimpsed, or at least collectively hallucinated, from a New York sewer...
...Helprin's portrait of old New York is not much more engrossing...
...The warmer colors-the reds, greens, violets, and grays-were the core, and the more ethereal and metallic colors the sheath...
...The blue, white, silver, and gold beams that comprised the sheath were transparent, blinding, and jewellike, and a halation that appeared substantial enough to walk upon followed and echoed the main structure in a diffuse, spangling silvery road...
...When the story reemerges from this cloying interlude, the hero and his world somehow matter less...
...One wonders where the author of "Martin Bayer" and "Tamar" is hiding in the following passage: From the Battery rose a beautiful angled beam of light in every color...
...These qualities are no less essential to fantasy fiction, but they are largely absent in Winter's Tale...
...If nothing else, this shoddy, self-indulgent fairy tale offers a case study of the perils faced by any writer who trades in our world for one of his own making...
...If you liked the Hassidic bridge-boogie in "Ellis Island," then you'll love the time warps, flying horses, and carnivorous "cloud wall" in Winter's Tale...
...Light-not the kind you or I might discern-but painterly, expression-istic rays from the sun, stars, radiant faces, magical bowls, and apparitions are rendered with more care than the personalities of the main characters...
...Each section was as tall as a man, a yard wide, and how long no one could tell...
...The two writers share a fascination with myth, fable, Eric Goldstein is a writer living in New York City...
...It is natural for a writer with these concerns to be attracted to the fantastic...
...The Ellis Island collection contains two fine short stories...
...Helprin's pirouettes into the fantastic, however, proved to be among the dimmer aspects of his fictive world...
...and whimsical beasts sighted in the Caribbean Sea...
...Tamar" is about a young Jew's brief glimpse into the life of London's wealthiest Jews on the eve of World War II...
...The wacky improbabilities in "Ellis Island" add to its verve-Helprin can, after all, tell a story-until the plot veers off into the fantastic...
...These writers know that a foray into the fabulous must be convincing on some level to the reader, whether it involves a Hobbit-filled Middle Earth or a Paramus, New Jersey that is true-to-life except for one talking chihuahua...
...Between its covers, which are two excruciating inches apart, Helprin's romance with fantasy unleashes all of his vices as a writer...
...Winter's Tale sets out to be a celebration of the imagination...
...Joyce Carol Oates admired the "Gabriel Garcia Mar-quez universe" within Helprin's first novel, Refiner's Fire (1977), while a reviewer for Harper's hailed its "dancing in and out of reality...
...Helprin, phone home...
...It is painful to report that this description is not just hype from the publicist...
...They are filled with moments of "heightened reality" that are vivid and stirring...
...A publisher's blurb paints the novel as "a romantic fable as dazzling as winter at noon, in which Peter Lake, an Irish burglar, leads the dreamers and lovers and rascals of New York City across snowdrifts of time in an arduous dance towards the year 2000, where the Promised Land of justice hovers on the horizon...
...the crooks are not redeemed as characters by virtue of being "in rebellion to capture the light of heaven...
...Helprin is attempting in all of this to convey the expansiveness and the possibilities of America, and of life itself...
...Without it, the novel can provide neither escapist fun nor a world that enhances the reader's regard for his own world...
...In "Martin Bayer" a ten-year-old boy vacationing with his family on Long Island in 1916 discovers "that he carried a store of strong memories which emerged bright and clear in his eyes and gave him access to a world of random and sudden images as beautiful as the upwelling of music...
...Time warps, cloud walls, and the trick of whirling your enemies overhead amount to little more than one-liners or tools serving Helprin's revelation of a "perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone...
...The zany exploits of a gang of ruffians are recounted ad nauseum...
...Solid beams mitered the air, rose through the plumes and disappeared beyond sight...
...The title of the new work seems to pay homage to Isak Dinesen, author of Winter's Tales, whom Helprin clearly admires...
...Most readers sense a boundary, dividing the implausible or the eccentric from that which ignores the workings of the world as they know it...
...When house burglar Peter Lake and his would-be victim fall immediately in love, "It was as if they had been kept from one another for a thousand years and would not come together for yet another thousand...
...the art and artifice of storytelling, and man's place in the natural order...
...Masters such as Kafka and Garcia Marquez use it to transport the reader to strange, internally cohesive worlds that enrich our perceptions of our world in a way that "realistic" fiction cannot...
...There are a few nuggets buried in Winter's Tale, such as a vestigial pre-Indian tribe of clamdiggers living in the Bayonne Marsh and Peter Lake's hideout above the constellations pictured on the ceiling of Grand Central Station...
...Even with these reservations in mind, Helprin's new novel, Winter's Tale, comes as a shock...
...If this image is transcendental in its simplicity, then so is every Harlequin Romance...
...It is begging the question to argue that all fiction is make-believe and reality subjective...
...Both stories are suffused with Helprin's romanticism, yet both are anchored in a specific milieu that is evoked by concrete, carefully chosen details...
...Soon after this point, unfortunately, the heights begin to lose touch with the reality...
...There is, as a result, little solid ground to stand on in Winter's Tale...
...Too often, however, Helprin's millennial etherealizing precedes and befogs his imagery...
...It is also, unfortunately, the force that beams the author to that exalted plane where plotting, characterization, and an internally convincing universe matter less than the timeless and the ineffable on the one hand, and his own whims on the other...
...Helprin has attracted attention for experimenting with techniques and voices, most notably for his use of fantasy...
...Beginning with a Ragtime-like survey of turn-of-the-century New York and building to an apocalyptic "gilding of the universe," Winter's Tale is a playful blend of social history, fantasy, hyperbole, adventure, romance, nonsense, parody, and metaphysical mythmaking...
...Except for some moving glimpses of squalor, his Arabian Nights-like metropolis alternates between the sublime and the ridiculously colorful...
...After a head injury, the hero wakes up in a world populated by what seem to be Hassidic Mad Hatters...
...Casually inserted and indifferently imagined, they give the narrative an arbitary quality...
...and that his romantic sensibility could captivate, when it did not lead to unearned epiphanies...
...The first eighty pages are magnificent...
...But now, chest against chest, arm cradled in arm, hallucinatory and light, they felt as if they were whirling in a cloud...
...Ellis Island," the novella, shares with Refiner's Fire a fascination with the American experience, viewed this time by a young Jewish artist arriving in New York at the turn of the century...
...It is a fairly literal synopsis of the plot...
...As one character reminds us, imagination "is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world...
...Newsweek's Peter S. Pres-cott proclaimed that Helprin "writes stories that are as good as any being written today," citing as evidence the way he "weaves imperceptibly among realistic images . . . and images of fantasy" in the novella "Ellis Island...
...An eternally nineteenth-century hamlet upstate is just too wholesome and enchanting...
...Few of the fantastic touches in Winter's Tale have much life of their own...
...a horrific, city-sized slaughterhouse whose workers lose all conception of time...
...Marshall Pearl, the young Jewish hero of this picaresque tale, mixes with millionaires and rednecks, battles Rasta-farians in Jamaica, drops out of Harvard, dreams himself back into the Civil War, scales the Rockies, crawls through sewers, gets "spat on the beach" after a shipwreck, and dies a hero in the Six Day War...
...Crossing this boundary, even when "dancing" over it, must be justified aesthetically and contextually...
...Refiner's Fire and the short stories in Dove of the East (1975) and Ellis Island (1981) showed that he could spin a good yarn, when his rarefied prose did not undermine it...
...At a time when so many American authors are either chronicling the drabness of modern life or writing novels about writing novels, Helprin likes to sit you on his lap and tell a good story, usually with a few epiphanies up his sleeve...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
