Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire is a long ambitious novel of almost spectacular arbitrariness….

[Various episodes in the novel] might have comic possibilities but Helprin's tone is cool and unamused. A pattern does begin to form, and damned if it doesn't seem designed by Ayn Rand, all about the light of the West, the refining energy of a naturally endowed aristocracy: "There was nothing greater, thought Marshall, than men like this who had lasted, who were old, whose passions had been refined in fire and in ice and yet whose love was solid and gentle and true."…

Marshall is a Jew, and must be got back to Israel somehow, where perhaps he will find a new heaven and a new earth. But Helprin does not seem interested in Jews and his Israel is positively distasteful. Marshall is thrown into an Israeli regiment of criminals, idiots, sadistic officers, and a few others like himself, though what fifty pages of suffering do for him is unclear, because we don't know if or how much Marshall has been refined before or during it. He ends up on the Golan Heights, and we can presume he has become refined at the very end when, wounded, in the hospital, he pulls the tubes from his body and says, twice, "By God, I'm not down yet."… [Is Refiner's Fire] subtler and more carefully worked than I think it is? If the pieces can be made to fit, they will turn out to be held together, I suggest, by a dreamy romanticism of a silly and bigoted kind. (p. 42)