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I'm all for blurring
genre edges when it comes to novels. Some of my favorite authors are
blurrers. After reading this, I gotta say that Helprin's style of
blurring isn't my favorite. What's set up as yet another piece of
historical fiction (or period fiction, I guess), turns into way far
out, uh, fantasy. And I don't mean fantasy in a breastplate and glowing
sword kind of way, but more like a runaway dream. The odd part is
that this disassociation from reality grows and morphs as the book
progresses. Sure it's a little fantastical to have a flying horse.
Okay, I'll deal with the fact that there are some weird marsh people
who live like semi-savages in Bayonne behind some mysterious cloud
wall. Where things started to detach for me was when Helprin basically
named a time, a city (New York) and them proceeded to completely fabricate
everything that was actually going on in said city at that time. This
weird funhouse mirror thing continues through all 768 pages, warping
time, history and plot boundaries. I'm not really certain if this
is supposed to be some alternate reality or bizarro universe, but
in this world, people of Manhattan in 1999 still ride in ice boats
to get upstate (if they ever did), don't seem to have highways or
new roads of any kind and still have horse-drawn carts. There are
people who come back from the dead, others who have lived for hundreds
of years, and a whole rash of some imaginary gang from The Five Points
(which still exists in '99, along with something called "the
City of the Poor) that have all been dumped into the future by powers
unexplained. I would attempt to encapsulate the plot, but the meandering
narrative doesn't really fit neatly into a short little package. It's
overly long, and repetitive at times and completely uneven. From one
day to the next--and it did take me quite a while to get through--I
went from wanting to find out what happened next to dreading having
to once again read the fifty thousandth description of a frozen Hudson
River. I just couldn't get past the whole dual real/fantasy world,
I guess. It would be like reading a book that took place on the European
front of World War II, and all of a sudden there were seas in the
middle of France, and some country called Zyzygy that had magic flying
machines from the past that swooped down and annihilated the German
army that was being led by their dictator, Klaus Von Peanutbrittle.
It's like all the real things are there, but the facts around them
are all wrong. I almost feel like it was a cop out on Helprin's part,
allowing him to be not even close to historically accurate about anything.
Why look up who was the mayor and governor, and president back in
1902? I can just make that shit up. Even more disturbing are the number
of typos in the text of the book itself. Usually I'll catch one or
two, but I seem to recall at least ten instances of stuff being screwed
up. I supposed in such a long book, it's bound to happen, but seriously,
get a proofreader. It's a shame, really, as Helprin is a good writer,
and can certainly paint a really nice picture with his words, but
this thing just got away from him. Maybe it's not his fault at all,
and in fact he needed a better editor. I'd be interested to hear someone's
opinion who never lived in Manhattan and see if they actually thought
what Helprin describes throughout is a realistic representation of
New York. Helprin really does get to the core of why people love this
city, but unfortunately his is a city that doesn't really exist. Of
course I'm sure I completely missed the point--but that's what makes
opinion.
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