themes is parents’ love for their children. He allows the narrator ofMemoir from Antproof Case, for example, to state the importance of parental love most succinctly, while other characters, such as Hardesty Marratta in Winter’s Tale, show it. Helprin avoids ideologies in his fictions, presenting ideas in the debates of the times in which the stories are set. He favors treatment of such universals as the conflicts between good and evil, right and wrong, and justice and injustice. Repeatedly, his characters benefit the most from love of family and friends, and it is from this love and for these people that the characters turn their incapabilities into their capabilities. The novels are only mildly formulaic—in many cases, a primary character is dead at the end, and all the characters are variously abandoned, challenged by evil, loved, or strengthened to perform good works. The works are uniformly positive, and Helprin’s reliance on the past for settings enables him to focus on those characteristics that unify, not divide, people.

Refiner’s Fire

Refiner’s Fire, Helprin’s first novel, was published in 1977. It is the story of Marshall Pearl, from his birth in 1947 through his late twenties, when he is wounded as an Israeli soldier in the Israel-Syrian War. The novel commences shortly before Marshall is born with the story of his mother Katrina Pearl’s escape from Europe in World War II on a ship sailing for Palestine. During a sea battle with the British, who are refusing the refugee ship entry, Katrina is crushed in the hold. The baby is discovered by a child, whose mother gives him to the American captain, Paul Levy, who in turn sends Marshall to French nuns with a note explaining the circumstances of his birth. The sisters send him to a U.S. orphanage, where he is adopted by the Livingstones, a wealthy and childless upstate New York couple. During his first summer-camp experience, Marshall’s prowess as a rider earns him the love of Lydia Levy. After some years in New York, Mr. Livingstone moves the family to Jamaica, where Marshall, though a boy, is involved in a territorial war between a local family and Rastafarians. Marshall proves himself an able guerrilla fighter, foreshadowing his future as a soldier.

After enrolling at Harvard, Marshall drops out before he graduates and travels west. He works in a slaughterhouse, spends time with a naturalist in the Rockies, and enlists in the U.S. Navy. He is reunited with Paul Levy, who tells him who he really is, and he learns that Lydia is Paul’s younger sister and an heiress. Marshall and Lydia marry and set out to find Marshall’s father. This portion of the novel contains the greatest suspense, as Marshall and Lydia are separated as he climbs in the Alps and again when he is drafted into the Israeli army, where he eventually meets his father, Arieh Ben Barak. Helprin tells the story of Marshall’s parents’ courtship in a flashback.

Fighting against the Syrian tanks, Marshall is severely injured; he becomes comatose and is reported missing. All the members of his family, Paul Levy, the Livingstones, and Lydia, set out separately to find him, finally converging at the hospital. In the final pages, Marshall regains consciousness before he sees anyone, muttering to his faithful nurse, “By God, I’m not down yet. By God, I’m not down yet.” Helprin uses a third-person narrator and limited symbolism in the novel, the title of which refers to the purifying power of fire. He also uses flashback, dialogue, suspense, and his own experiences as a soldier in the telling of the story.

Winter’s Tale

Winter’s Tale is a fantasy that tells the story of New York City in the winters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The parallel main characters are Peter Lake, an Irishman and a thief, and Hardesty Marratta, a San Francisco newspaper writer who moves to New York as a young man. Peter Lake’s main companion is a magical white horse, Athansor, while Hardesty’s is his wife, another writer, Virginia Gamely. The story is narrated by a third-person omniscient speaker, and Helprin allows both Lake and his horse to fly and to perform feats of great strength and personal endurance.

Lake’s life is a series of adventures and misadventures, beginning with his orphanhood and life with the Reverend Mootfowl, who teaches him how to operate complicated nineteenth century machines. After he kills Mootfowl, he joins the Short Tails, a gang led by Pearly Soames. Lake informs on the Short Tails, and for his crime he is pursued for nearly one hundred years in New York City. On the run, he breaks into the home of Isaac Penn. There he sees, then becomes involved with, Penn’s beautiful, musical, and terminally ill daughter, Beverly, who becomes his mystical protector after her death. When Lake is later injured, he becomes an amnesiac. On the street he encounters the Marratta family, with their friends, Praeger de Pinto and Jessica Penn, Isaac’s granddaughter. They all work for Harry Penn’s newspaper, where Lake eventually gets a job operating the old machines, which none of the new mechanics understand. The machines regulate the actions of the city.

When the Marattas’ daughter Abby is dying, her father once more encounters Peter Lake, who is now living behind the clock in New York’s Grand Central Station. Helprin’s knowledge of the city and of the Hudson Valley region are key to the descriptions that drive this book. Lake and Marratta join forces in an effort to travel across the city to his daughter, made difficult because the city’s boroughs are at war, thanks to the Short Tails and the sinister Jackson Mead. Lake is wounded by a Short Tail in the journey, and Abby dies.

Lake returns to his job in the machine room at The Sun newspaper, where Harry Penn is able to tell him of his identity and his past. He leaves the paper and finds Athansor, who has had a terrible parallel life without Peter, and they go off to their separate ends. In the epilogue, Helprin asks the reader if Lake’s death had a purpose and if his attempt to create a city built on justice, with Marratta, was worth the costs. As critic David Rothenberg has observed about the winters of this novel, the cold landscapes are used as positive sources of self-reliance and as images of containment.

A Soldier of the Great War

The protagonist of A Soldier of the Great War, Alessandro Giuliani, is the son of a prominent Roman banker and a soldier in Italy’s war with Austria (1908). Eschewing a career in the law, Alessandro trains to be a professor of aesthetics, and it is the pursuit of beauty and truth that gives him the greatest personal strength. Once enlisted, he is not at sea but instead on land, serving in the River Guard, a unit that recaptures Italian deserters. One of the deserters kills the captain of this unit, and all the soldiers flee. Alessandro and his friend Guariglia return to Rome. Caught, they are sentenced to death, but Alessandro is saved by orders that his father’s former scribe, Orfeo, keeps writing for him at the Ministry of War. Alessandro’s life parallels Orfeo’s, who is described as the person who is really running the war.

The unit to which Alessandro is assigned is at the front, and while digging trenches there, he is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Austrian soldiers and is seriously wounded. His beautiful nurse, Ariane, with whom he falls in love, is a French Italian; Alessandro had actually seen her once before, when she was a child. They become lovers and plan to marry; however, the hospital dormitory in which Ariane lives is bombed before Alessandro’s eyes by Austrians pursuing an Italian cavalry unit.

As the story is told in a flashback sequence, the reader knows that Ariane is not dead, but it is the perceived loss of her that colors all of Alessandro’s actions in his years remaining in the service. For instance, he is taken prisoner while retrieving the body of a college friend, Rafi Foa, to whom his sister was engaged. As a prisoner, Alessandro’s adventures include riding with the enemy’s hussars, stealing a Lipizzaner stallion to escape, and attempting to kill the German pilot he thought had killed Ariane. Back in Rome, he is reunited with her and their son, Paolo, and the next chapters cover Alessandro’s life between 1915 and 1921.

The story is framed by two modern-day chapters in which Alessandro is still demonstrating his sense of justice and his strong will to live. In 1964, he is seventy-four years old and on his way to see his granddaughter on a bus when he gets into an altercation with the bus driver because the driver has failed to stop for a young passenger, Nicolò Sambucco. The bus driver puts the rather frail old man off the bus, and Alessandro and Nicolò, two unlikely companions, decide to walk to their destinations, though this will take several days. As they walk, Alessandro tells the willing Nicolò about the past and provides him with an education the younger man could not have obtained in school.

Helprin has stated that the idea for this novel grew from an experience he had in Italy in 1964. He was stranded at a train station and engaged in a staring match with an elderly, decorated Italian soldier. Helprin believed the incident was an effort on the older man’s part to impress his past on the writer’s memory and imagination. Although the book is rich in historical and scenic detail, Helprin has clarified that it was not heavily researched and that it is based mostly on his year in Rome and early travels.

Memoir from Antproof Case

Memoir from Antproof Case is a humourous satire on social ideas of vice and virtue. In the stream-of-consciousness narrative, a father relates his story for his son; he keeps the pages in an antproof case, so ants cannot destroy the pages. The narrator calls himself Oscar Progresso, which is just one of several aliases he has used in his life. Now in his eighties, he tells a tale of his military heroism as a pilot in the Army Air Force during World War II, of a brilliant robbery, and of his relocation to Nitéroi, Brazil. Once in Brazil, he marries a beautiful bank teller, Marlise, and teaches English to Brazilian naval cadets. He is obsessed with the evil effects of coffee, which he hates because of how it changes the body’s action and smell (Helprin humorously dedicates the book to Juan Valdez, the fictitious advertising icon of Colombian coffee).

The narrator is a violent youth who first kills a man on a commuter train in his native New York over an incident involving coffee. He also divorces his first wife, billionaire Constance Lloyd, when she takes up coffee drinking. He is sent as a boy to an asylum in Switzerland, and after his release he works as a runner for the banking firm of Stillman and Chase. He attends Harvard and Oxford, serves as a flying ace in World War II, and rises to partnership as an investment banker in his firm. He offends the senior partner, Edgar B. Edgar, in an incident involving coffee and is sent to stack gold bars in the building’s basement. There he sees the foolish overseer throwing out bullion because it does not shine, and he realizes he can steal the gold bars with no trouble.

With a partner who is an engineer and works for the Transit Authority, he devises a successful and elaborate plan that allows them to succeed. His partner settles with his family in luxury in Europe, while Oscar relocates to Brazil. In a flashback chapter, it is revealed that Edgar killed Oscar’s parents when they refused to sell their farm for the building of a bridge across the Hudson River in 1914. Oscar kills Edgar before he flees, but on the flight to Brazil he has to make an emergency landing in a river, and he loses the plane and the gold.

The witty and eccentric Oscar places family loyalty above all else in his hierarchy of values. He is even happy to raise the boy Funio, the product of Marlise’s affair with another man, as his son. Among the other characters in Helprin’s fiction, Oscar is the most physically fit. He is injured only a few times, and his dread of coffee and of alcohol keep him largely in good health. As a first-person narrator, he is engaging, and because he is eighty, his movements in time create variety in the tales he tells. Instead of framing the story with present-time narration at the beginning and the end, Helprin incorporates past and present into most of the chapters, effectively creating time shifts in Oscar’s memory. Readers of Helprin’s three previous novels will recognize the allusions to the bridge building and a discussion of La Tempesta by the Venetian Renaissance painter Giorgione, which is a unifying device in A Soldier of the Great War. Memoir from Antproof Case ends with Oscar recognizing that it is time to end the writing when he cannot buy a larger antproof case from the son of the stationer in the shop where he bought the first one in 1952.

Freddy and Fredericka

Freddy and Fredericka imagines the Prince and Princess of Wales on a journey through the modern United States in an effort to reclaim the nation for the British crown. Helprin has stated that the story of incognito royalty was suggested to him when, at a restaurant, his children casually asked if a couple washing dishes were Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. From this germ, Helprin fashioned a hapless and selfish pair who are parachuted into New Jersey in fur bikinis to start their ascent to individuality and ultimately to fitness for the throne of England.

Equipped with false identities, Freddy and Fredericka, who lose their front teeth on impact when dropped from a royal transport plane, must scramble for their lives and learn to work. In the course of their year in the United States, they engage in a variety of trades and occupations, from self-taught dentistry to fire-spotters for the Forest Service, ultimately becoming political advisers to the failed presidential campaign of Senator Dewey Knott. Through all their trials, including various run-ins with the law and time in an asylum, Freddy and Fredericka learn to know themselves, realize the power and intelligence they possess natively, and come to love each other in a way that many of those in arranged marriages may never know.

When they eventually return to England, Freddy has largely lost his penchant for ridiculous antics and malapropisms, and Fredericka has learned that real beauty is not to be found in designer shoes and décolletage. By the novel’s end, Freddy has assumed the throne, a wiser and more worldly man; in the course of things, he has lost both Fredericka and his mother, Queen Philippa, to death, and he has become father to Princess Lucia, who was conceived in America.

Critics have rightly noticed the affinity of Freddy and Fredericka with the works of Mark Twain, Henry Fielding, and Evelyn Waugh. The novel adheres to Helprin’s characteristic themes and interests and contains passages of outlandish humor and deep sincerity, as when Freddy tells Fredericka that one becomes noble “by recognizing the greatness of others and humbly receiving your appointment” or place in the world. Bred to pomposity and a life of frivolity, Freddy and Fredericka develop the mettle to be the monarchs they were destined to be, enhanced by humility and grace.