Books by author: Mark Helprin

This was one of the best reading experiences I've had to date. Helprin's book is wonderful: sleek yet full of intricate detail, clever yet not pretentious. I read most of the book over a two day period, which was a good way to do it, I think, since many details remained fresh in mind throughout the entire story. I look forward eagerly to reading more of Helprin's work (after I finish some of the stack of books I received and purchased this holiday season!).

I adored Helprin's Memoir From Antproof Case, and I had high hopes for his Winter's Tale, but my expectations were so shattered by the latter book that I waited almost six years to try another of his novels. I do like Refiner's Fire better than Winter's Tale, but my initial love of Helprin's writing has definitely faded.

Refiner's Fire is the life story of Marshall Pearl. In the opening scene, we meet Pearl on his deathbed in Haifa during the 1973 conflict, where he served as an Israeli soldier. After this brief opening, we're given a whirlwind tour of Pearl's life, probably intended to be "flashing before his eyes" as he nears death. His life starts in conflict, on an illegal immigrant ship in 1947, where he is orphaned during a battle. He is brought to New York by the boat's captain and adopted by a Jewish family. As he grows up, he has a series of outlandish adventures, from fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, to stowing away on a train, to working in a surreal slaughterhouse, and so on. He ends up in Israel, searching for his biological father, where he is conscripted into service and is near-mortally wounded. The novel ends on a poetic note that ties things up nicely.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, I was not impressed with the series of Marshall's adventures. Several of them serve no real purpose in the scheme of things (other than to show off Helprin's fertile imagination), and although they are interesting as vignettes, they don't all quite fit into the tapestry of the novel. Also, at times, Helprin gets a little carried away with his use of language and ends up obfuscating things unnecessarily.

This is a better book than Winter's Tale, and I was tempted to give it four stars, but in the end I don't think it quite deserves them. It's a good novel, but not great.

Mark Helprin is a tremendously gifted prose stylist, but his plotting is a bit loose. In A Soldier of the Great War, he presents the meandering life story of Alessandro Giuliani, an Italian man whose tenure in World War I is full of outlandish adventures and remarkable coincidences.

On a paragraph or page level, there is much to be admired here, but as a whole, there wasn't enough arc to the character to be satisfying. Most of the episodes make terrific vignettes, but the composite whole didn't resonate with me.

I started this a day early, apparently, but I don't think that explains why I didn't care much for this book. Winter's Tale is something like a John Irving novel, written while tripping on acid after having read juvenile fantasy books. Okay, so it's not that bad. The prose is clean, but mostly uninspired; there are no descriptions that jump off the page like some of the ones in Memoir From Antproof Case did.

Some people adore this book, and I can in part see why. It's a breezy read with a large number of fairly interesting characters and quite a lot of creative reality twists. On the down side, I didn't find the overall plotting of the book to be very coherent, and there are far too many characters that aren't quite "minor", even for a near 700 page novel. My main frustration stems from the fact that there were so many promising elements in this novel that never became coherent.