Word: helprin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...into the sick bay of the short story wanders 34-year-old Mark Helprin with his second collection of short fictions. "Ellis Island" and Other Stories. And though we might hope him to be the prophet of the short story's Second Coming, a blazing savior curing the lepers and breathing voltage into numb forms, we find that he's not quite what we were looking for. Instead, we must relegate him to the narrow ranks of the "solid" young performers who, while they are not yet the transcendent pace-setters, at least don't drop the torch. Pathetically, even...
...writer to begin renaissance in a tired form he needs to introduce a diction, tone and sensibility that somehow sums up his era and delineates an artistic program for it. One thinks of the short stories of Fitzgerald or the works of Hemingway. But Helprin's art seems produced in almost complete withdrawal from the contemporary scene. He strives for "loveliness" above all else, a tasteful--but hardly compelling--goal for a young writer today, the world and the collective psyche being what they are. Thus, one can hardly call Helprin a voice of our times. Instead, he chooses...
...unfortunately, it also makes one restless. It's just too perfect, and in the end it is, dare one say it, awfully boring. What's crystalline and well-crafted often leaves one cold. When Helprin's not affecting an especially tedious antique style for telling whispy tales of love lost and childhood winters in Vermont, he proceeds with an eloquent lack of inspiration. Neat shaping of sentences and admirable technical confidence do not make up for a lack of that obscure energy that transforms les mots justes into great writing. In some ways the style belongs to the 18th century...
This theme of serial selves, of second and third acts in American lives, also appears in Mark Helprin's The Schreuderspitze, in which a man leaves his family for what appears to be a Wanderjahr in Europe. He transforms himself into a mountain-climbing machine, conquers an Alp and heads home with what some readers may interpret as a jogger's expensive high...