The Novels of Mark Helprin

Last updated summer, 1997

Mark Helprin will not appreciate my inclusion of his writing in the Fantasy category. Truthfully, some of his novels are not fantasy at all while others skirt the borders of fantasy. Still, Helprin has a fine appreciation for fantastic and I can see the similarities between his work and the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of all the serious modern novelists, Helprin is the only one that I find interesting.

Helprin has only one character, it is the young man, about 22 in the full power of his body and ardor. There is one woman for the hero, a lovely creatures who can be won suddenly and forever with passion. As every novel needs a plot, something terrible occurs and our hero must spend the remainder of the novel recovering or repairing the damage. I'm not sure if Helprin has anywhere new to go, but at least two of his novels rank as some of the best literature of the last 20 years.

Winters Tale

Winter's Tale (1985?) has two spectacular beginnings, set 70 years apart, a workable middle, and an ending that doesn't quite come off. Still, the first half of the book is so wonderful I still rank it as one of my favorite books. The first beginning is about Peter Lake, a young man living in New York around 1900. Peter Lake is part of a criminal gang called the Short Tails but he betrays them to save his family and is only able to escape with the aid of magical white horse. He then meets and falls in love with the beautiful but consumptive daughter of a newspaper owner. Some time later, Peter Lake is mysteriously transported (by his horse) some 70 years into the future. That is the end of the first beginning.

The second beginning concerns another young man who sets out from San Francisco in the mid-1970s. This young man, having turned down a great fortune, is off to search for a transcendent city. Oddly enough he leaves San Francisco and heads across the country to New York city. Along the way he has some remarkable adventures, including an unforgettable series of attempts to cross a deep fast river with the non-aid of a crazy Irishman. The second beginning ends with his arrival in New York city.

The idea of transcendence is vital to the whole story. I went looking for reasons why and my personal theory is as follows: Helprin is Jewish (at least to some degree) and some Jewish theology argues that the only way to achieve God's plan is to build the kingdom of heaven here on earth. What they argue is that we must seek to create the perfect, or transcendent world here on this earth, rather than waiting for some after-life that they aren't convinced exists. I found the idea profoundly moving, even though I'm not Jewish (or any other religion for that matter).

A Soldier of the Great War

This book was written many years after Winter's Tale (1991). I regard it as Helprin's finest work. It is a beautiful novel full of the wonders of life, the feelings of love that people have for one another, and the horror and brutality of war (in this case, World War I). There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, wise stories about love, religion, and politics.

The story in this novel is fairly straight forward, it is about a young Italian man who grows up just in time to fight in the great war (as World War I was first called). He fights in the mountains in northern Italy, is put into a prison camp, fights with the Sicilian bandits against the Italian army, fights the Germans, and ends up as the prisoner of a most remarkable military unit: the Austrian Emperor's Hussars, a unit that eats better than kings and does no fighting, being led by a pacifist General. In the mean time our hero has met the love of his life and lost her.

This novel, a remarkable act of imagination, was a joy to read, and worked from beginning to end. A truly wonderful book.

Memoir from Antproof Case

I think this book is very poorly titled. Even though I loved Helprin's previous two books, I was very leary of this book, could it be a good book with such a miserable title? Well, I was more right than wrong. This book, published in 1995, suggests that Helprin has run out of ideas. Almost nothing in this book wasn't done better in one of his previous works. If you were new to Helprin you might enjoy this book more than I did.

This book was hurt by several things, first it was poorly put together. I realize that Helprin was trying to reproduce the writing of a man who was not a writer by training. No doubt he was trying to recreate a voice of a specific person. I felt his attempt was a failure and the somewhat chaotic structure of the novel made it far less effective than it might otherwise have been. Another problem was the narrator's odd fixation on coffee as the great evil in the world. It was bizarre and silly. It made the character far less sympathetic than he otherwise might have been (even though I basically dislike the stuff myself). Finally much of the novel was concerned with his efforts to steal a great deal of gold from a bank in New York city. The whole activity was stupid, the narrator didn't care for money, didn't wish to ruin the bank, and ultimately did nothing with the gold.

A poorly executed novel with an unappealing main character. It had its moments, and Helprin can write, but nowhere close to the quality of Winters Tale or A Soldier of the Great War.

Refiners Fire

This was Helprin's first novel (though he had written many short stories before this). It is a seemingly true to life account of a young man who, like the author, leaves the United States for Israel and joins the Israeli army just in time to fight in the '73 war (on the northern front against Syria). I didn't like the novel that much. For some reason, it didn't do anything for me on an emotional level. It is a very realistic novel with none of the flights of fantasy that characterize Helprin's later works.

Next author: Guy Gavrial Kay