I had a suspicion, about a month ago, that the cruel Michigan winter would not end until I finished Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel “Winter’s Tale” — as if the 700-page, epic, real-world fantasy is somehow capable of directly intertwining itself with the lives of its readers. And, in many ways, it absolutely is.
Those of us in the senior class might remember Helprin as Hillsdale’s commencement speaker in 2011. While some devout fans seem to prefer his other works — such as “Refiner’s Fire” and “A Soldier of the Great War,” both in the college bookstore — his most well-known book is “Winter’s Tale.” And, given Helprin’s other role as a conservative commentator (and Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute), I’ve had the curious experience of perusing left-leaning book blogs and forums online to find their patrons just as enamored with Helprin’s literary genius as the general public — some even puzzling, “How could a conservative have possibly woven such beautiful words to paper?!” Not bad. So what could keep the reading world this shaken up after 30 years?
In summary, “Winter’s Tale” is a mythic ballad of New York City, a juxtaposition of a city’s beauty with its ugliness as experienced by various characters whose different narratives all miraculously converge on the city itself, bringing their destinies together for reasons that are not quite clear until the end. In a fashion truly reminiscent of a “city upon a hill,” the book repeats thematically, “For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone?”
The main storyline belongs to a man named Peter Lake, abandoned by his immigrant parents near the start of the 20th century, raised in combat on a shrouded island by the clam-fishing Baymen, tutored in engineering at a boys’ orphanage by the Reverend Mootfowl, and coerced into burglary by the psychopathic Pearly Soames and his bowler-wearing gang of Short Tails. When Peter betrays Pearly, he must go on the run — with the help of his guardian angel, a majestic white horse named Athansor. It is in this lonesome capacity of a burglar whence comes the defining moment of his life. As he attempts to rob the West Side mansion of Rockefeller-esque Isaac Penn, Peter instead encounters and falls in love with Penn’s dying daughter ,Beverly. And with her eventual death, Peter is given a sort of new life. That is, after disappearing and having been long forgotten, he resurfaces — at the other end of the century, in a vastly different New York City, without his memory. It is then, in the book’s third quarter, when Peter’s path is destined to cross both with the modern characters whose narratives together span the majority of the novel and with some of his aged acquaintances or, in the case of the Penn family, their descendants. As the book informs us: “Nothing is random.”
Helprin writes beautifully, and he is proudly unconventional as well. Despite serving heaping mounds of charming simile to improve the reader’s experience, his narrative style is straightforward and focused on furthering the story, save for fun moments such as, “the rooster was so happy that had he been a chicken he would have laid three eggs a day. Or was he a chicken? Who knows? The point is, he thought he was a cat.”
All in all, better than just telling an epic tale, Helprin crafts a world filled with human characters just like him: talented eccentrics. No one is ordinary, but everyone has a task and does it well. Reading through, they reminded me vividly of my fellow Hillsdale students, in fact. I confessed earlier that “Winter’s Tale” gets inside your head and, as good art does, tries to resonate with your life in countless subtle ways. Perhaps this is just one reason why.
