BOOKS

The Liveliest Arts This Month: Previews, Reviews and Overviews

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WINTER’S TALE, by Mark Helprin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Tendrils from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude have begun to sprout and curl in North America: first in Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur and now in Mark Helprin’s luxuriant phantasmagoria of New York from the turn of this century to the fiery arrival of the year 2000. Helprin’s surreal city teems with fanatic visionaries, swaggering crooks, and homelike proletarians. The wealthER is miraculous—a great freeze, an itinerant cloud wall that swallows ships and shrouds an upstate village from geographers. Time is elastic, death is reversible. The hero, who lives twice, is befriended and repeatedly rescued from his enemies by a flying white horse from Brooklyn.

A tale spinner of Scheherazadean resourcefulness, Helprin can be a windbag on the subjects of time, history and eternity. This book of wonders is periodically interrupted by high-toned messages from the sponsor: “You can’t expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn’t experienced it himself. Those who haven’t, know only reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they will never believe you.” I’m ready to believe anything, but when I’m promised revelation and teased with portents it makes me cross, after 600 pages, to be handed a fortune cookie: “...in the eyes of God, all things are interlinked; and ...love is not broken by time.” A bridge from New York Harbor to infinity keeps being announced but never gets completed.

Don’t trouble your mind with this stuff. Winter's Tale is full of excellent tall stories and serendipitous eccentrics: a buxom countrywoman with a pet rooster named Jack and a vocabulary of 600,000 words; a cocksure Rumpelstiltskin who proves, in the novel’s wittiest episode, to be a fatally inept mountain guide; a wonderful baby “flattered silly when his mother spoke to him as if he understood.” The burglar hero, who falls in love at first sight with the daughter of a tycoon he goes to rob, has a terrific hideout behind the stars in the zodiac ceiling of Grand Central Station. When Helprin’s magic works—more than half the time—it works very well, and when it falters, something good is just a few pages AWAY.-WALTER CLEMONS

COLD HEAVEN, by Brian Moore (Holt, Rinehart and Winston). The protagonists of two of Brian Moore’s best novels, The Lonely Passion of Judith Heame and Catholics, yearned for a sign from God and stared into emptiness. The heroine of his new novel is afflicted by unwanted intimations of a supernatural power she fears and hates. Vacationing at Nice, trying to get up the nerve to end her marriage, Marie Davenport sees her husband injured in a boating accident and unmistakably declared dead. His apparent resurrection, into a borderline condition between life and death, arouses her guilty dread of a miraculous vision she saw exactly a year earlier and has resolutely concealed. “Why me?” Marie asks a bumbling priest who intrudes on her privacy. “Why somebody who doesn’t believe?”

That’s all you should be told. This is high-risk material, requiring psychological sureness and acute novelistic tact, which Moore has. In playing on the possibilities of paranoid delusion, simple coincidence, and religious mystery, he has learned, I think, from the successful ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw as well as from the miscalculated miracles in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. One reads Cold Heaven the first time as speedily as a thriller. A second reading deepens my admiration for the cunning with which the book’s climax is prepared. There is no cheating anywhere.

W. C.

■THE SACRIFICE, by Frank Bidart (Random House). Frank Bidart is the apotheosis of the Romantic ideal of “a man speaking to men.” As in his two earlier collections of poems, Bidart at his most powerful is a man shouting, whispering, murmuring, shrieking to men, in the highly dramatic monologue that is his characteristic form. His poetry is eccentric, with copious italics and capitals, and precise, pointed line breaks elaborately engineered on the page. Without flouting the constraints of language in the manner of some experimentalists, he manages to be shocking (a hard thing to do these days), voicing moral crises—of faith, art and sexuality, among others—for himself and for the characters in his poems. Perhaps it is because he is shocked that he shocks us. “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” “Genesis 1-2:4,” and the wrenching “Confessional” (perhaps the last confessional poem possible) are the best of this extraordinary collection.

A.B.

■ PIERRE LOTI: THE LEGENDARY ROMANTIC, by Lesley Blanch (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). A nineteenth-century French novelist and naval commander, Pierre Loti was the consummate poseur, a rare creature in rouge, high heels and Oriental finery. Loti eluded legions of lovers, from harem girls to sailors, but he has not, happily, managed to escape from this wise, wily and utterly beguiling biographer.

D.S.

■ BUT NEVER EAT OUT ON A SATURDAY NIGHT: An Appetizing Glimpse Behind the Scenes in All Kinds of Great American Restaurants, by Jim Quinn (Doubleday). What Balzac was to the printer’s shop, Jim Quinn is to the restaurant kitchen—the loving reporter of laborintensive, skilled work. Quinn takes the fad out of foodism, puts the heat back in the kitchen, and serves up a world of real restaurants, both haut and bas, where illusions are not yet lost.

E.P.

■ THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION: Critical Essays in American History, 1860-1960, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Pantheon). Rich varieties of American self-display.

■ VANESSA BELL, by Frances Spalding (Ticknor & Fields). More life among the letters in Bloomsbury.