THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin (Penguin, 576 pp., $27.95) Freddy and Fredericka is one long, but highly readable, book. It's admirably suited for the...
...Indeed, Freddy and Fredericka is a refreshing celebration of American virtues...
...Success means they will have to work hard and acquire some humility...
...In America, Freddy will prove his worth by trying to make it in "a vast land inhabited by fierce, clever, and industrious creatures— monsters...
...Few American writers today can handle the English language with such ease and consummate virtuosity...
...The tale of Freddy and Fredericka proceeds from the amiable premise that once upon a recent time in Great Britain there lived a glamorous and much-talked-about prince and princess of Wales...
...While Helprin has a grand time with this creative frolic through American states and institutions, he is also genuinely serious in his admiration of all that is fundamentally good about America...
...of bay-like widenings that promised the sea at the end of the flow...
...of towns that had died long before but refused to sleep or go under because they could not cease watching the river...
...It's admirably suited for the summer season, when many of us have a bit of leisure time to settle into a good story...
...He's a nice enough fellow but is spoiled and has a tendency to muck up on public occasions...
...of birds that floated on air cast back by boats and barges...
...It's probably no coincidence that Helprin is a former speechwriter for Robert Dole...
...Reading Helprin is sheer joy...
...Freddy—though nearly 40—just doesn't have the makings of a king...
...of fields that burned in little worm-like lines of gold wool...
...of bridges that passed overhead, the bottoms of their decks space-black from hundreds of years of coal and diesel smoke...
...and of the progress of the banks as the boat threaded through tangled nature, charging onward and full of the promise of life...
...The most savage land on earth...
...His princess is extremely beautiful but is also spoiled and ditzy...
...Later, in his grandest job, Freddy finds himself secretly advising a long-shot presidential candidate...
...The queen and her consort Prince Paul call an adviser, Mr...
...Consider this description of the Mississippi River: The shore was ever-changing, a world of twisted limbs and bleached tree trunks resting askew on sandbars...
...of fields under the spray of irrigation machinery that rolled slowly on twenty-foot wheels...
...In the course of their American experiences, Freddy and Fredericka grow up through a series of adventures that have them zigzagging all over the country...
...They are to parachute into Hoboken, New Jersey, penniless and in a primitive disguise: naked except for panels of rabbit fur attached to their bodies with thin straps of green snakeskin...
...The praise on the book jacket that testifies to Helprin's splendid mastery of language and compares him to Joyce and Nabokov is confirmed as soon as one opens the book...
...Neil (an anagram of the wizard Merlin), who comes up with a solution that will make the young couple fit to reign...
...At one point Fredericka is scrubbing toilets in a huge office building...
...of rivers joining the Mississippi like new riders swelling a pracession of horsemen...
...Cynthia Grenier...
...of the wind that fed the fires as they crawled across the fields, made safe by the mile of water that stopped their sweeps...
...It also happens to be an utterly beguiling book...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 46
