How about I lay my cards on the table at the beginning here: I am (was?) enamored by Mark Helprin's latest novel In Sunlight and In Shadow. After I finished the last pages I fell to the floor in something mimicking prayer. It was not as great of a novel as A Soldier of the Great War or as mesmerizing (and, let's face it, confusing) as Winter's Tale, but this is the one that gut-punched me the most of the big Helprin works. Briefly, the novel follows the love story of Harry Copeland, a 32 year old Jewish World War II veteran and inheritor of a struggling Manhattan leather goods company, and Catherine Thomas Hale, a socialite WASP with aspirations for Broadway. They meet cute on the Staten Island ferry and the book proceeds from there, which is to say spends the remaining 690 pages tracing this love and the characters' desires to embrace the beauty of this world (and its overwhelming pain) through bravery and sacrifice.
I was first introduced to Helprin in his short story collection The Pacific and I think part of what makes him so memorable to me as a novelist is the short story-like feel that asserts itself even within novels--the three aforementioned--that were my son to stand on them he would be able to ride any rollercoaster his heart desired. As I look back even on my reading of In Sunlight, what sticks out to me most of all is the vignettes: the girl Harry races through a reservoir on a kayak, enraptured by her beauty but shut out from her life, never even learning her name, this moment of rapid, unrequited love; the flashback to Harry's WWII service, in particular the tank that exploded while carrying his men and his helplessness to help; his swim across the inlet outside a posh East Hampton club to declare his love for Catherine and accost her swinish fiancé; the attack on the mafioso's compound juxtaposed with Catherine's stage performance in the books culminating act. And on and on. It is not that the book doesn't have a cohesive narrative, it is simply that what lodges in my mind most is not the broad scope of the novel and its denouement, but the little moments of observation and intense detail that make you pause, scoff, laugh, shake your head, or crumble to the floor your heart overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.
The criticisms of Helprin as a novelist--such as they exist--tend to focus on two areas: his romanticism and his anachronism. Wedded to one another, the charge becomes that he romanticizes what in reality was a crappy, falsely-idealized past. Thus you have the New York Times reviewer bemoaning the "idealized portrait of how society looked" that has been "resuscitated" by Helprin. Romanticism makes an easy target. Grit is in. The grittier the better. Want to see a body broken by hand so as to fit into a suitcase? There's a show for that. Ever wondered what chemicals would dissolve a human corpse? Breaking Bad has you covered. And Game of Thrones exists primarily to showcase the depravities humans can inflict on one another. But the debunking of romanticism is so often tired and so often misses the point.
This past fall I taught Lord of the Flies to a group of sophomores. Bleak. Affecting. Unromantic. But, realistic? That is the question: are we really that bad? Was Calvin right to the nth degree? A question I posed my students, as we came to the conclusion, centered on this question: is the novel ultimately realistic? We talked about the rose-colored glasses through which romantic literature often wants us to look and how the soft hues distort the crushing realities of the world. True. But is it better to look at the world through shit-colored glasses? (As a sidetone, this is a shocking question to ask students at a Christian school.) In other words, by shifting from a romantic worldview to a harshly realistic worldview are we not simply falling into a ditch on the other side of the road?
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this novel--and about Helprin's oeuvre in general--is that he makes me want to be better person: a better husband, lover, father, son. By unashamedly allying himself with the order of the past, he is calling forth the deep community that at one time governed our relationships and has since been replaced with today's enervating individualism. He is calling us into love, beauty, divinity. He is inviting us to recognize the world around us as something ineffable, infused. This is good.
Romanticism is problematic when it denies a Creator with a sovereign plan for this world. Put another way, romanticism is problematic when it takes as its basis a distorted notion of human goodness (and this it does often). But for a Christian, isn't the world--and the story we live within this world--ultimately a romance, a comedy in the classical sense? Doesn't it end in a marriage, with every tear wiped from every eye, and all things made new? I know virtually nothing about Helprin as a person or a religious believer, but the romanticism he calls us into is a world governed by God and his goodness. The world, then, as it really is. Or, if failing that, the world as it should be and one day will be. It is at its core redemptive literature.
