Woody Allen has been both praised and criticized for creating a fantasy version of New York in his movies —depicting a city that is no longer "a grimy urban jungle," in the words of film critic William Rothman, but "the most photogenic city on earth, boasting buildings and trees that even Paris would die for." Rothman concludes: "As if we needed more proof that cameras can lie!"
Novels can also purify and redeem cities, even one as resistant to redemption as New York. And among authors, none has attempted a more ambitious or thorough literary regeneration of Manhattan than Mark Helprin. In his 1983 novel Winter's Tale , Helprin aims for nothing less than an apotheosis of the city, a sanctification by fire that, at times, crosses beyond the familiar terrain of the novel and enters into the realm of myth or dogma.
Peter Lake, the main character in Helprin's epic work, undergoes a personal redemption as well. A one-time burglar, previously known as Grand Central Pete (a name borrowed from a real life NY con man of the nineteenth century), Lake reinvents himself, first as consort of a Manhattan heiress, and later as a catalyst in the millennial transfiguration of New York itself. The messianic overtones of Helprin's story gradually become more obvious as the novel progresses—Lake learns to travel through time, later develops psycho-kinetic powers, and eventually plays a key role in raising a girl from the dead. But even at the start of the novel, Lake’s origins as a sea-faring orphan raised by the mysterious Baymen of Bayonne Marsh in New Jersey recall the story of the infant Moses amid the bulrushes.
Lake possesses a dim comprehension of the destiny awaiting him—sensing that he may play a key part in dawn of a new age. This anticipation of a coming splendor is shared by many other characters in Helprin's novel. Lake's lover Beverly Penn, slowly dying from consumption, is mesmerized by transcendent images—discovering "grace, or madness, in her visions of the starlight" where she sees "a sky full of animals whose pelts were made of an infinite number of stars. They moved slowly and smoothly, for, really, they were motionless." Readers expecting these koan riddles to be explained will be disappointed, and much of this novel needs to be read with the kind of forbearance one brings to a sacred text, where mystery is cultivated rather than solved.
Lake also encounters an even more visionary individual: the bridge builder Jackson Mead, who dreams of a grander span than those made of steel and stone—something more akin to the Tower of Babel than to any terrestrial structure. Lake also meets up with Hardesty Marratta, who gives up the family fortune to a ne'er do well brother, and travels to New York, as part of a vision quest to find a perfectly just city. Other dreamers who populate this book include newspaper owner Harry Penn, brother of Beverly, and his editor-turned-mayor Praegar de Pinto; while even the villains Pearly Soames and Craig Binky have their heads in the clouds. But Lake’s most unusual companion is the white horse Athansor, who has more in common with C.S. Lewis ' s Aslan than Seabiscuit or Secretariat. In short, Helprin's New York is anything but a hard-headed, practical city—instead spawning cadres of prophets, sages and dreamers.
If you don’t recognize typical stereotypes of New Yorkers in this list of characters, you will be even more shocked by the description of the landscape. And there is plenty of it: by my estimate, at least 300 pages of this 750-page novel is comprised by descriptions of locales. Countryside, cityscape, shoreline, skyline: Helprin piles sentence on sentence, paragraph on paragraph, page on page, and by the time you have read the 100th poetical evocation of water, cloud and skyscraper, you will fall back in both admiration and weariness. Few writers can set a scene with more sheer gusto than this novelist, but should scenery really take center stage in any drama?. Helprin is especially inspired by winter settings, and his ingenuity in describing white on white reminds one of those proverbial Eskimos with their hundred terms for snow. By the same token, a hundred or so pages of this frosty, breathless prose could have been excised from Winter's Tale , and would hardly have been missed.
Despite all his adjectives and subordinate clauses, a relentless ambiguity permeates Helprin's New York. This too is part of literary style of Winter's Tale . Take, for example, the following passage:
"There he was bobbing and floating on rafts of color high above the streets: silvered canyons and warm red brick, the lisp of a huge broken clock, trees like bells shuddering sound in green, silent streets as dark and elegant as mirrors in dim light, a thousand paintings left and right—islands in the stream cascading from above, the heat of pale stone, merchants forever frozen who never ceased to move, cooing purple pigeons shaped like shells, an arsenal of roses in the park, streets that crossed in forks and chimes, leopard shadows, dappled lines."
And you may ask, how can a merchant be frozen and yet move? What is meant by an 'arsenal of roses'? How can a street get crossed 'in chimes'? When are pigeons 'shaped like shells'? What is the 'shuddering sound' of trees that are like bells?
I have no answers to these questions. Yet such passages are typical of Helprin's mystical tone. Where other authors deliver precision in a few sentences, he provides vagueness in many paragraphs—intentionally, no doubt, and with the plan of hinting at grand things "through a glass darkly," but in a manner that will leave some readers just as frustrated as others are exhilarated with his intimations of a more majestic city behind the visible one. Truly, Helprin outdoes Woody Allen in this depiction of a Platonic ideal of New York.
For this same reason, Helprin is drawn to the fuzzy side of nature, and devotes endless passages to fog, mists, clouds, snow. He is champion of anything that obscures our view, anything that replaces clarity with vagueness. Few writers would take on the mission of describing that which cannot be described, but this, it seems, is Mr. Helprin's most cherished ambition.
All this comes out most clearly in the final pages of Winter's Tale . Here Helprin (in a book, remember, published in 1983) presents the final days of 1999 and the dawn of the year 2000. No Y2K doomsayer or fearmonger quite envisioned the kind of cataclysmic changes that Helprin lays out in his concluding chapters. But even here our author is coy, and holds back from explaining the transformations afoot.
The result is a sprawling, poetic and unconventional novel. I was enchanted and dismayed by turns in reading it. Even as I grumbled about the author's oblique prose and roundabout method of storytelling, I marveled at the sheer abundance of his descriptions and the daring of the narrative. True, there are plenty of other New York novels, and many are more accurate than this alternate history, or more sharply plotted, or richer in character and dialogue. But Helprin actually reinvented New York, turning it into a kind of New Jerusalem. He made Manhattan magical. And even in a novel, that is no small matter.
Yet, in the final analysis, Winter's Tale remains a failed masterpiece. I admire our author’s ambition, but what he is aiming for here is like the alchemist's transmutation of lead into gold; at some basic level of atomic structure, the change cannot be realized, no matter how deft the author's sleight-of-hand or how boldly he plunges into the magical and marvelous. And the obstacle here is not New York—I accept that it can be redeemed or glorified or whatever you want to call it—but the essence of fiction itself. By abandoning the constraints of storytelling, and seeking instead to infuse his narrative with the reverberations of scripture, Helprin reaches for effects that perhaps no novel can achieve.