Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Winter's Tale
Book Review: The Best Work of Literary Fiction I've Ever Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Unlike just about any other author I've ever read, Helprin has an incredible ability to evoke imagery and emotion in the most beautifully, and often hilariously, written style. 'Winter's Tale' combines the grit and romance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York with his philosophy of human love and aspiration. This is a story born of democratic principles and the concept of the greater good: man can achieve great things, experience great loves, and be heroic to his fellow man, as long as his purpose is singular and his work ethic strong.
This is a magical journey in which fantasical literary elements step in to poetically communicate the grandeur of Helprin's ideas--a device that works to enhance the otherwise realist prose. Helprin's masterpiece drives some of the same ideas of self-actualization and greatness as Rand's "The Fountainhead", without, thankfully, the preciousness or egoism.
Book Review: The Cheesecake Factory rendered in prose
Summary: 1 Stars
The moral and artistic equivalent of a Thomas Kincaide painting. A video game with very high production values, where you're forced to read long passages of turgid travel journaling before you can get to the next level and keep playing.
There's a convenient portable heaven that serves the same function as "and then I woke up and it was all a dream." This object is one of many deus-ex-machinas in a plot that delivers whatever its characters need, exactly at the moment they need it: luck, money, skill at cards, prestigious newspaper jobs, disease-and-fertility-free sex partners, magical flying horses, the vocabulary of a PhD candidate in linguistics, mechanical engineering skills, romantic soulmates -- anything anyone might strive and work and pine for, these characters get, just in time, and then never use again. Helprin does all this knowingly; fate, luck, and the absence of consequence seems to be part of the point. But so what? I can't care about characters who are unchallenged and unchallenging, and who can't be harmed.
Mark Helprin deserves one star for gorgeous confectionary prose. There are acres of pretty passages, some truly lovely metaphors. The prose is at all times aware of its gorgeousness -- it's a shellacked, stage-directed supermodel, scrupulously careful of its costume. I kept wishing something with a soul could break out of there, but a character with real complications would leave muddy shoeprints all over, distracting readers from the so-beautiful descriptions of fantasy landscapes, non-beings and un-things.
What comes through most strongly to me is that this is the work of someone who wants to be known as a Great Prose Writer. Mark Helprin's prose begs to be petted, adored, admired -- and it really is worthy of admiration. But the story isn't. I'm left wondering what the story is even about. "Love"? "Redemption"? How can those concepts resonate in the absence of characters vulnerable enough to embody them? Unlike some of the truly great prose stylists (Nabokov, Martin Amis), Mark Helprin isn't challenging. At all. Because his characters are automatons; they do as they're told, patiently servicing once cliche after another in a plot that seems to exist only to convey Mark Helprin's prose.
Book Review: The World According to Mark
Summary: 1 Stars
Published in 1983 in the midst of the Reagan (Counter) Revolution, WINTER'S TALE reenacts the 19th century cult of the self-made man (and, somewhat liberally, woman) as the true American Hero. In short, Helprin extols the pre-Progressive Era as a glorious, if messy, alternative to the "immoral" effects of welfare state liberalism.
Regressively repackaging the fabulist techniques of South America's magical realists, Helprin creates for our edification a small band of geniuses who fight for the right to express their personal excellence (through neo-liberal capitalism) against the leveling tide of utopian utilitarianism (aka Marxism/60s Liberalism). All his characters are exalted individuals, even the villain, and so all become very quickly tiresome. Because they are geniuses, they don't learn anything as the story progresses. Instead we learn that genius must be given every opportunity to express itself, as long as it is for the benefit of mankind. As such, WINTER'S TALE violates the core idea of what a novel is.
Real novels tend to be suspicious of the exalted, especially of those who occupy exalted positions based on birth or social class. Helprin, while not a supporter of an aristocracy based on birth, does believe in a perverted version of the Jeffersonian idea of a natural aristocracy. Perverted because it fails to take into account the barriers erected by elites to the expression of this American idea of a wise and benevolent meritocracy. It therefore suits his neo-liberal ideological bent to set the larger part of his story at a time in American history where there was more class fluidity, a time before the large corporate enterprises and their hierarchical management structures began to foreclose the possibility of true individualism.
And so he hypocritically points to this pre-corporatist time as a valid model for our hyper-corporate era without having to take into consideration today's anti-individualist ethos. Writers like Swift, Defoe, Dickens, Melville, Hugo and Zola exposed the hypocrisy of the new economic elite who supplanted the old aristocracy by turning a burning interrogatory spotlight on the cruel iniquities generated by the bourgeoisie and their partners in government. Helprin shines a soft-focus light on the savage iniquities of the Industrial Revolution and decides, all in all, it was a better time.
WINTER'S TALE suffers from an underlying ideological framework that treats characters as hostages to an argument for the rightness and naturalness of neo-liberal paternalism. Unlike a real novel, WINTER'S TALE papers over the cracks in our belief in the resurrected values of Calvinist capitalism, tightens the ideological blinders that support such a view, and keeps true believer's prejudices firmly, and for many, blessedly, intact.
Book Review: Transcendent and Profound
Summary: 5 Stars
Much ground has been covered in previous reviews. What is important about the book is its profound effect on its readers. It has not been diminished, but has been enhanced, through time. I can think of no other book that has given me greater perspective on the juxtaposition and tension between past, present and future. An astounding book that still leaves me breathless.Book Review: Transporting, haunting -- dream machine
Summary: 5 Stars
One of those rare books I read over and over. Helprin is a master of magical realism. Splendid prose, a flying horse, the Short Tails roaming the rafters of Grand Central Station, a tubercular heiress on a rooftop, and Peter Lake -- master mechanic and second-story man of New York's Belle Epoque. What's not to love?