With Refiner's Fire, Mark Helprin … risks more than most novelists dare in 10 years. Helprin writes like a saint, plots like a demon, and has an imagination that would be felonious in all but the larger democracies. That Refiner's Fire is his first novel (though second book) humbles me, and that Marshall Pearl, his Odysseyan protagonist, went to Harvard and yet still emerges as a likable soldier of fortune stuns me. Ivy Leaguers are supposed to be no longer eligible for veneration. (p. 72)

But, back to the beginning, for Helprin's nature is starkly exemplified in his first book, A Dove Of The East (1976). Here, in a collection of generally competent short stories … Helprin practiced sketches of his heroic temperament. There are no antiheroes in Dove, of course, but there are young men torn between the fantastic and the desperate…. [There] is, in the title story, a mythical Jewish cowboy tending a cattle herd on the Golan Heights. The cowboy's soul mesmerized me; his sad history as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust come to a redemptive victory with a dying dove in the Levant must have permanently shaped Helprin's fiction. At heart, Mark Helprin is a noble Jewish cowboy.

For it is the state of Israel—the idea of the state of Israel, the romance of the state of Israel—that Helprin preaches with an eloquence that may be unmatched since, well, 1947, the year of Marshall Pearl's birth. Refiner's Fire can be read as an adventure story, but it can also be read as an allegory of the profounder sort. Marshall Pearl becomes the state of Israel. And this is not the Judaism of the schlemiel, so familiar in much modern Jewish fiction but the Judaism of the Torah. Marshall Pearl is not Philip Roth's Professor of Desire. He is Judah's David. (pp. 72-3)

His experiences are more metaphorical than perhaps need be (this sort of fiction can stumble into fairy tale). Pearl is precocious beyond measure….

I will not deprive you of the glamour of reading Marshall Pearl in the Israeli army by mentioning particulars. It has as much Heller comedy as it does Mailer pathos. And Helprin makes the battle for the Golan Heights so transcendant that, momentarily, lost in the firefight between the Israeli Centurions and the Syrian T-62s, I considered enlistment myself. (p. 73)