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BOOKS In the storytelling trenches with Mark Helprin...
There has never been any question about Mark Helprin's talent, and since his first books of fiction, A Dove of the East and Refiner's Fire, he has seemed on the point of accomplishing marvels. He has also seemed -- notably in Winter's Tale, an overblown fantasy starring an annoying magical horse -- to be a posturer incapable of modulating eloquence or intensity, a too appreciative taster of his own words, a gifted windbag...
...Helprin's big, rumbustious new novel is about four-fifths of a marvel. Helprin has simplified his language, though he still works up a good head of rhetorical steam, and he has moderated his enthusiasm for phantasmagoric set pieces. He has also picked themes -- war and loss, youth and age -- that suit a large, elaborate style. His hero is a 74-year-old Italian, Alessandro Giuliani, during World War I a soldier who fought the Austrians and, in 1964, the novel's present time, a professor of aesthetics. Alessandro meets Nicolo, a 17-year-old illiterate factory apprentice, when they...
Just as the reader, with more than 700 pages still to march, begins to worry about blisters, the youthful Alessandro takes over the narrative. Here, for a very large chunk of the novel's center, Helprin writes with riotous energy and $ sustained brilliance about boyhood, youth and war. There is a strange, dreamlike adventure in the Alps, when Alessandro at age nine or 10 is caught up in a mountain rescue, then in a preadolescent erotic tangle with an Austrian princess. Later there is a splendid silliness in which he taunts a couple of mounted carabinieri while riding his horse...
...Candide; his character darkens and hardens as the fighting grinds on. The author's view of war is grim enough to be quite modern. But his evocation of love is thoroughly romantic, and so, in the balanced flourishes of the ending chapters, is his novel. Fair enough; as usual, Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction...