Refiner's Fire is a rather old-fashioned novel. It receives impressions of the outer world without cynicism or the self-confessed failure to understand, and Mark Helprin is so sure of his own narrative skills that the novel glows with his permanent presence. In other hands, this could all become breathless and boring, but Helprin escapes fatuity by being genuinely talented. It needs a kind of genius, I think, to accept orthodoxy and, by accepting it, to make it live again.

In other words, Helprin hasn't trod doggedly in the footsteps of other and older novelists. Everyone under the age of thirty-five now seems to be imitating the dry, toneless and wry manner of a Roth or an Updike: forgetting that if you imitate American writers who burned and faded in the 'sixties, your own writing will be so far out of sight in the 'seventies that it will be practically invisible. Mark Helprin has turned his back on all of that and if, in his awkward position, he can sometimes be clumsy or bathetic, he can also reach moments of lyricism which are as satisfying as they are unexpected: 'That night in his bunk Marshall felt as if all the mountains and the heights of the sky were in him … and that night in Colorado the moon came up so bright that even sheep and horses could not sleep, and stood in the fields staring upwards as confused as the first astronomers.'

Marshall Pearl, the absurdly romantic figure here, is clearly some sharp image of Helprin himself … and that can pose peculiar difficulties. When the author is intimately involved with one character, everything in the book becomes a mirror for their double-reflection. Pearl is squarely at the centre of the narrative: born on an immigrant ship, by a mother he never sees, he is adopted by an American family and that whole continent becomes the geography of his obsessions. He is invaded by physical distress, adolescent love, and also by mysterious fits of epilepsy which leave him weak and unguarded. In a sense epilepsy dominates the book, since the plot itself centres around mysterious moments of violent activity, stupor and acts of monumental self-control….

Refiner's Fire's most important, and attractive, quality is its absence of realism on every level. The book is wonderfully egocentric; Helprin trusts his perceptions enough to transcribe them directly, without the benefits of realism. The language is affective rather than descriptive, floating among adjectives and adverbs which, if you were to examine them too closely, would blur and dissolve. The book might easily have turned into a spectacle of one person's personality, as trials are overcome and escapades successfully completed, if it weren't for the fact that Helprin can always turn outward to problems of plot and perspective.

It could have meant, for example, that the novel could become over-determined as the author struggles toward some kind of grand and permanent self-expression. But then Helprin's vitality reasserts itself: he has a great capacity for telling stories, twisting the plot this way and that, and forgetting the boring questions of 'tone' and of message…. It is part of his self-assurance—part of his ability to abandon all the readily available methods of writing a modern novel—that he can control his novel with great fluency and invention. He is so self-assured, in fact, that he can employ some powerful but generally outmoded ideas without embarrassment. There are references to 'the race' (in this case the Jewish race), to 'history' and to an idea of 'the West'. This attitude takes its toll—it means that the book is rarely funny, which is a pity—but there is nothing wrong with orthodox writing as long as it stays interesting. 'Realism' is no longer interesting; fashionable American writing is no longer interesting; 'modernism' is no longer interesting. Vast egotistical longings, magical panoramas, and an ability to contort the language into unusual shapes, still are. And this is where Refiner's Fire makes its mark….