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A review of Winter’s Tale

by Mark Helprin

Magical realism hits New York in a massive, beautiful poetic novel

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

Winter’s Tale Let’s say you’re heading to a summer house where you can read on the porch swing every afternoon, or on a skiing vacation where the others will leave you in front of the fire every day while they hit the slopes. Take a journey to a fantasy New York of two eras: the early 1900’s and just around the recent turn of the millenium. This is New York as you’ve never experienced it in real life: a white horse that can jump the length of Manhattan, oyster-collecting Baymen in marshy New Jersey behind the white for wall; a wise newspaper founder whose beautiful Mozart-playing daughter is dying of tuberculosis, and much more.

Most of the characters are mysteriously drawn to New York. None of it can really be real. And yet it’s all so close – and wonderful – that one can enjoy imagining that it’s just an exaggerated version of the way things really are. For instance, a man jumps in the water – one minute after he does so, the huge ship he’s chasing "sent up a plume of black smoke and went dead in the water," enabling him to catch up to it.

The poetic prose style is one you need to get used to: "His teeth were like the signposts that appear in the remoter camps of expeditionary armies to point the way to the world’s brighter and more congenial locations. They thrust in all directions." And either you’re open to Helprin’s poetic exaggeration or you’ll find it somewhat offputting: "The second story of each commercial building on both sides of the street for five miles was the home of a karate dojo. He walked past these during the lunch hour, and heard several hundred thousand combative screams, as figures in white sailed through the air, legs cocked and arms outstretched, like Russian dancers." Colors and light themselves are practically the book’s theme: the white horse, an art thief dreaming up a gold room, bright streaks of silvery light.

There’s no end to the unusual images: gang meetings held a thousand feet below the Harlem River in a siphon; the hero sleeping under the roof of New York’s Grand Central Station, above a ceiling where the night sky‘s constellations are lit from behind with tiny bulbs; a changing painting thirty feet by sixty feet; the Mayor’s three offices: City Hall for meetings of ceremony and tradition; a high-rise for making decisions to benefit the future; and fifteen floors up with a mid-range view of Brooklyn and the harbor for transacting the city’s political business.

The women are intensely beautiful, marvelously well-read and intelligent. The book is very positive: there’s never a moment of looking back in anger or mourning or regret; the characters are always looking forward. And there are numerous magical coincidences.

This is not a book to consume in a weekend or a couple of long evenings. You’ll need to invest quite some time just in getting used to the long, poetic sentences. But it’s worth getting into the right frame of mind, suspending your natural disbelief as Helprin extols the imaginary beauties of a fantasy New York.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Winter’s Tale

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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