Word: helprin
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...Helprin uses a poetic style to capture the tone of the narrative ballad or the epic poem. This gives his plots and characters a remote quality: they are seen through a haze of words. The richness of his language can be a source of delight, and in some of his stories, like "A Jew of Persia," it is effective in creating an atmosphere...
Here, and in other stories, the remoteness and haze are carried to an extreme. The characters become flat, or stylized to the point of implausibility. In "Lightning North of Paris," Helprin is unable to bring to life the garret affair between two Americans in Paris, a composer and a ballet dancer; wrapped up in his descriptions of the composer's wild moments when he writes "music which if played for pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky," Helprin is happily oblivious of the fact...
...Helprin also has problems with dialogue, and manages in most of his stories to keep it to a minimum. Fourteen out of the twenty stories are very short--four or five pages in length--and some suffer from a long, descriptive introduction; expectations are created which are left unsatisfied by the brief action at the end. One of the strangest stories in the collection, "Katrina, Katrin'," begins with a valiant struggle to reproduce the everyday speech of office workers on a New York subway platform, then abruptly shifts to a long, narrative story-within-a-story, a form with which...
...HELPRIN HAS a striking ability to make the remote and unusual seem familiar and understandable, and, on the whole, his stories are most effective when he centers them around places and people which are geographically or simply ideologically distant. By means of the timeless themes of the human need for roots, for the security of family and culture, for the love of the land, he makes them seem a conceivable part of modern experience...
Perhaps the most moving story--and the most delightful--is the first one, "A Jew of Persia," where the folktale situation of a woodsman's encounter with the Devil is firmly set into twentieth-century Israel. When the situation is reversed and he is writing about everyday America, Helprin often feels compelled to use style and language to give his story an exotic strain. Helprin is not unique in his desire to blend the old and the new--he is following such writers as John Fowles and Isaac Bashevis Singer--but he has managed, through the juxtaposition of form...