Word: helprin
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...MARK HELPRIN LOOKS well-scrubbed. His face, in a vaguely romantic photograph on the back of the dust jacket, is clean-cut and clean-shaven; the face of a liberal, New York-bred college graduate. It comes as no surprise is that he went to Harvard. What is more of a surprise is that he once served in the British merchant navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force. In the title story, "A Dove of the East," and in others scattered throughout the book, Helprin re-creates the people and places of his travels. The settings of these...
Present-day America does appear in a few of his stories, but even here Helprin usually blunts the edge of reality by recounting events through the cloud of memory. His continual shifting of location and characters is baffling at first; how can he have something important to say about the life and customs of each place, about the young Hebrew scholar and the aging Catholic priest, the Canadian orphan with musical aspirations and the illiterate Italian aristocrat? Slowly, it becomes apparent that Helprin is experimenting with the application of his theme--the mixture of past and present--to different situations...
...However, Helprin's vehicle for adding the present to the past--and imposing the past on the present--is primarily his language, style, and structure. He is often more concerned with the form of his stories than with the particular situation and emotions involved, and the result is that some of his stories lack any hold on solid experience. It is not surprising that his most successful stories are those in which he manages to blend a mastery of technique with a thorough knowledge of his subject--as he does in the third story, "Ruin," where he imparts an understanding...
Unfinished Business. In Philadelphia, Clara Chmiel wrote to Willow Grove Amusement Park Manager Joseph Helprin, explained that a year ago she had become engaged to Stanley Gutowsky in the park's Tunnel of Love, asked and received permission to be married there...