The Exquisite Lightness of Helprin
WADE, ALAN
The Exquisite Lightness of Helprin A Soldier in the Great War By Mark Helprin Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 792 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Alan Wade Free-lance writer On an August afternoon in...
...He reaffirms that faith so often and in such ringing and defiant terms that I began to feel the novel had been written to score a polemical point...
...Reading A Soldier reminded me of Harold Bloom's comment in The Book of J that the original books of the Bible are "like a more sophisticated kind of children's literature than any we now possess...
...When the armistice comes, he is a POW working as a servant in the Hofburg in Vienna...
...The feeling is reinforced by the use of Giorgione's painting La Tempesta, the famously enigmatic canvas in Venice that shows a naked mother and child being watched by a soldier (or shepherd) while a tremendous storm looms in the background...
...Reviewed by Alan Wade Free-lance writer On an August afternoon in 1964, an elderly Italian gentleman takes a tram from Rome to the countryside to visit his granddaughter's family...
...The protagonist, for example, is relentlessly perfect...
...A Soldier resembles Helprin's previous works in that it contains enough action for a dozen epic films: Battle follows battle, tragedy begets tragedy, heroic deeds become almost routine...
...The impatient driver refuses to stop to pick up a young worker, so the old man indignantly demands to be let off...
...There he meets Ariane, an exceptionally beautiful nurse straight out of Hemingway, and instantly falls in love...
...You came in here to ask for it.'" So perfect a moment is rarely encountered outside of fairy tales, movies and Helprin's fiction...
...Helprin's version of World War I is a hell of absurdity and chaos...
...There are many such moments throughout the book, and while they give the story its humor, its terrific brio, they also make its world seem outlandish...
...That description could apply to Helprin's fiction as well...
...Alessandro survives the nightmare of war by adhering to a belief in "'the overwhelming combination of all that I've seen, felt, and cannot explain, that has stayed with me and refused to depart, that drives me again and again to a faith of which I am not sure, that is alluring because it will not stoop to be defined by so inadequate a creature as man...
...Apart from the structure provided by the old man telling his tale, too, there is hardly a plot, just an avalanche of events that engulfs Alessandro and the reader and carries both headlong through the War...
...Alessandro is obsessed by it...
...It abruptly ends the idyllic childhood of the hero, Alessandro Giuliani, who is thrust into the trenches and endures as bloody and tumultuous a series of adventures as the overflowing imagination of his creator can conjure...
...Helprin has truly created his own genre, and in his latest work he is fully its master...
...Soldiers working in a quarry are not merely strong, they are "three or four times stronger than the strongmen in the circus...
...Instead, we will continue to get wonderful yarns about people braver and wiser than we are, who have lived more, loved more and suffered more...
...We will get paeans to individualism, enjoy the tenderest of love stories, exquisite rhapsodies on the beauty of nature, and enough Boy's Life adventures for several heroic lifetimes—all told in a tsunami of irresistible and savagely funny prose...
...When finally they reach their destination, the story is brought to a close...
...Griffith or Cecil B. de Mille...
...Whether this is a failure of imagination or part of a deliberate strategy to formulate a world where everyone is articulate is arguable...
...It means love...
...He directs large armies across vast landscapes into titanic clashes with the skill of D.W...
...The lesson of both is that despite the appalling brutality of war, life is very much a blessing...
...Like his earlier novels, Refiner's Fire and Winter's Tate, this one is a grand fairy tale for adults, a Bildungsroman full of astonishing events related in brilliant prose that carries the reader through nearly 800 pages at a gallop...
...He talks an insubordinate blue streak about art and death and God, then is handed a pistol and ordered to a remote post in the Alps...
...Only Alessandro miraculously survives...
...He explains to whoever will listen that the soldier is returning from war, and the woman and baby offer redemption for his suffering, they give him hope...
...But it reflects a number of problems that seem to derive from a glamorizing tendency that is evident in everything Helprin writes...
...Winter's Tale was widely criticized for being an airy fantasy totally removed from reality...
...No doubt World War I was as murderous as the author imagines...
...Along the way the old man tells his companion the story of his life, the centerpiece of which is his service in the first World War...
...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he has taken up writing deliberately for the young...
...Helprin is one of the few serious novelists who has not relegated the panoramic scope and cast of thousands to Hollywood...
...He then persuades the youth that they are better off walking, though it will take them several days, and the two commence their journey...
...he is saved repeatedly by chance, his own daring, or the unseen intervention of Orfeo Quatta, a dwarf scribe presiding over a room in the Ministry of War where all military orders are issued — and where Orfeo alters them according to his own mad whims...
...He invents a multitude of spectacular characters: the men handsome or hideous, the women sublimely beautiful or grotesque, the heroes veritable Herculeses, and the villains blackhearted thugs...
...It means coming home.'" La Tempesta presides over the novel, which in a sense is a gloss on the painting...
...The new work is less fanciful and more deeply felt, but once more the author's compulsion to be clever draws him closer in spirit to Steven Spielberg and his Indiana Jones than, say, to Stendhal...
...He sees fighting in every part of Italy from Sicily to the Alps, and along the way encounters a Dickensian gallery of characters, most of whom die violently...
...That is the framework of Mark Helprin'slatest work,.4 Soldier in theGreat War...
...The single bright moment in Alessandro's military career occurs after he is wounded and sent to a hospital...
...The religious message that crops up throughout is no less admirable or suspect...
...True, there are no individual voices, and nothing resembling colloquial speech: Everyone speaks in a witty and polished prose that echoes the narrator...
...He is the Cary Grant of soldiers, always the most courageous and intelligent, always ready with an extraordinary deed or the last quip...
...No one in this sprawling tale is average, no one is dull...
...After three novels, two collections of short stories and one admitted children's book, Helprin has made his preference plain...
...They decide to marry, but their plans are upset by a bombing raid that kills her, and Alessandro returns to battle...
...In fact, I consider Helprin the most gifted American novelist of his generation...
...He is the one major adult novelist around today who has the soul of an author of children's books...
...When the bombing raid destroys his dreams of marriage, Alessandro enters a major's office for his next assignment...
...What does the painting mean...
...And his life seems subject to the same higher power that determines the destiny of a film hero...
...still, the grace and wit of the writing and the near insouciance of Alessandro as he marches along cause the slaughter to appear almost a literary device, a weight to balance the lightness of the style and characters...
...I do not intend this as deprecation (any more than Bloom did...
...Why?' "'Because,' the major said, 'it's what you want...
...Alas, the hugely entertaining story that illustrates the homily never quite rescues it from platitude...
...Even the frequent graphic depictions of carnage, though authentic enough, are not completely effective...
...Alessandro's intelligence, bearing and self-possession made him stand out not only among the prisoners but among the troopers and their officers as well...
...He will never give us complex characters or any degree of verisimilitude...
Vol. 74 • August 1991 • No. 9
