At last, the story can be told: of the love of a man for a woman so strong that it can leap class barriers and religious taboos; of a talented ingénue’s struggle to flout corrupt critics and float to Broadway stardom; of the valiant actions of a band of brothers fighting the Hun in occupied France; and of the moral courage of regular guys in peacetime, driven by their yearning for justice, law and order to stand up against New York’s brutish Mafia. Their attack comes with the blessing (and, more usefully, the munitions) of a quirky retired millionaire who’s devoting his golden years to founding the C.I.A. It’s incredible that this story — or, to be more precise, these stories — hasn’t been told before. Except that, of course, it has, and they have . . . though never before in more than 700 consecutive pages, between the covers of one book.
Mark Helprin’s sprawling new novel, “In Sunlight and in Shadow” (the title seems to have been inspired by the dirge-like ballad “Danny Boy,” so indispensable to mob flicks like “Miller’s Crossing” and “Goodfellas”), uses language, not music, to conduct the swelling themes of at least half a dozen Oscar-winning films to lyric crescendos. Passionate, earnest, nostalgic and romantic in multiple senses of the word (infused with love, straining with valor, prolific in fable), it resurrects with throat-catching regret and nickel-gleam luster the automats and assumptions of the America of the 1940s, both the sets and the sensibilities. Quite directly, and repeatedly, Helprin proclaims his novel’s mission through the reflections and perorations of his hero, Harry Copeland — a 32-year-old American paratrooper of Jewish ancestry who looks like a young Clark Gable and has just returned to Manhattan after serving death-defying overseas missions in World War II.
Harry decides his chief peacetime duty is to use his gift for gab to further his “overriding purpose,” namely: “By recalling the past and freezing the present he could open the gates of time and through them see all allegedly sequential things as a single masterwork with neither boundaries nor divisions.” Once he opens these gates, Harry will flood his audience with his redemptive epiphanic impression that “the world was saturated with love.” First, though, he must save his dead father’s leather goods business from Mafia goons and woo and win Catherine Thomas Hale, a 23-year-old heiress, songstress and all-around goddess he spots from a distance on the Staten Island Ferry. Falling in love with her at first sight, naturally, Harry mentally itemizes her attributes, from her hair (“bright as gold”) to her glasses (“a foil to the sharp assertiveness of her nose, which was small, perfectly formed, gracefully projecting”) to her teeth (“alluring palisades that cried out to be kissed”) to her breasts (“not large,” but possessed of “a perpetually attractive thrust”) before economically concluding that she is “just beautiful, beyond description.”
Harry and Catherine serve as the standard bearers of a mannerly and Manichaean age: a poster couple invented to persuade 21st-century readers of the way things once were and, presumably, still ought to be, reanimating a bygone era when men were men, women were ladies, wars were against Nazis, and even cowboys and their partners danced cheek to cheek.
As the historical record reflects, this halcyon period did not last. The decade that followed the glory years of “In Sunlight and in Shadow” would see the advent of Buddy Holly and Elvis (who dispersed the big-band stardust with floor-stomping rockabilly and swiveling hips) and the emergence of a new enemy (in Southeast Asia, not the Ardennes) who damnably lacked either an ear for Mozart or an eye for Gothic architecture. In reactionary terms, the world went to hell. But in the prolonged cinematic moment resuscitated in this novel, Helprin regilds the frame around an idealized portrait of how society looked, in Curtiz and Capra films, at least, before the essential and ineffable turned mutable and digital. It’s a pity this novel is being published in the autumn rather than the summer; it would have made superb reading for the vacationing 1 percent in August. That said, it will come in handy for anyone of a backward-looking temperament who sits by the fire come January, when the blizzards descend.
This précis serves, to an extent, as a reproof of what one loves. Which of us doesn’t pine for romance, fairness, virtue and bravery? Rich satisfactions come from savoring the archetypes Helprin varnishes here; and, as one character dreamily says in Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo” after a handsome leading man pops out of a movie screen and into her life, “He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.” Helprin’s heroes seem to crave similar indulgence. Throughout the novel, he splashes down paeans to virtue and beauty you’d have to be heartless not to enjoy, but mires them in sloughs of homily at which you’d have to be brainless not to bristle. That said, it’s altogether possible that male readers who long for works of fiction (scarce of late) that provide paragons of masculine excellence will find pleasure in this Boys’ Own tale for grown-ups. As for female readers, it may be helpful to ponder the insight Harry shares with his beloved Catherine: “Girls don’t have what boys have, which is a goatlike capacity to bang with the head against heavy objects that will not move.”
If this is so, “boys” may be more apt than girls to savor the repeat impact of Harry’s floodgate cargo, bearing the news that “the whole world is nothing more than what you remember and what you love, things fleeting and indefensible, light and beautiful, that were not supposed to last, echoing forever.” Then again, the female characters come out remarkably well, despite the machismo and exploding shells. Helprin invests nearly every woman in the novel with charm, virtue and desirability — even when she’s disfigured by war; scarred with acne; or old, poor or downtrodden. When Catherine accuses Harry of flattery, he stubbornly persists in his conviction that “a woman is the spur and essence of existence.” When she asks if his attitudes are antiquated, he chides her: “Women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time.” It’s certainly pretty to think so. (At least, it is if the person who’s doing the chiding looks like Clark Gable.) Yet, somehow, these fine sentiments and throwback characters belong to celluloid, not paper.
Thirty years ago, in his rollicking breakthrough novel, “Winter’s Tale,” Helprin thrilled more than he maddened, in part because that book was more thoroughly a work of fantasy. Anchored at the dawn of the 20th century in a brawny, lawless, magical Manhattan inhabited by flying horses, roving Irish gangs, lascivious guttersnipes, clam-digging marsh dwellers and consumptive damsels on rooftops, its apostrophes to wonderment came off as organic. In that book, a storm-bright Manhattan sky might naturally prompt a character to remark, “In those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry and justice, it becomes the color of gold — warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten.”
Passages of similar beauty and unchecked grandiloquence abound in this new novel, but their purple glitter contrasts jarringly with the olive-drab of war and the wan aisles of Woolworth’s. When Harry looks down on Manhattan from a height across the Hudson River, he thinks to himself, “All he had to do was close his eyes and breathe deeply, and the past would glide forward like a warm breeze — plumes of smoke silvered in the sun, ferries sliding gracefully to land, their decks crowded with souls long gone but somehow still there as if nothing were lost or ever would be.” Reading that mellifluous sentence, you know better than to drive to Weehawken and look for yourself. To see what Harry saw, you’d need the author’s romance-colored glasses.
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
