Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Winter's Tale was the first contemporary novel I ever bought in hardcover; it came out when I was 13 years old, and I was so taken by the worshipful front page review in the NY Times Book Review that I bought it. At the time, most of my literary reading had consisted of Charles Dickens novels, and David Copperfield had already put the writing bug in me. But it was Winter's Tale that fixed me on my course--Helprin's writing was so astonishing, his asides so insightful, his descriptions of places and people so tangible (I can still taste the hot rum toddies from the Oyster Bar!), and best of all, he was ALIVE. In fact, I was so enraptured with the book as a 13-year-old that for many years I was afraid to pick it up again, for fear I'd find it a lesser piece of work than I'd remembered. A Soldier Of the Great War had not had the same effect on me (though I still thought it was a superb book), and Memoir From Antproof Case had struck me as entertaining but erratic. Finally, a couple of years ago, I fetched my old hardcover Winter's Tale from my parents' house and got up the nerve to page through it again. Right away, I was swept right back into Helprin's fairy tale New York. It is what a great city ought to be: larger, wilder, more beautiful, a place where dramas play themselves out on a cosmic scale. And the thief Peter Lake remains one of my favorite characters in all of literature. The book does have its flaws, but what novel doesn't? The sections with Peter Lake are far and away the best; Part Two feels like Helprin is marking time (it was the slowest part of the book even when I was 13), and there are some who might find his italicized introductory sections tendentious (though I still get shivery when I read them). The women are all just a little too beautiful, and the men (other than Peter Lake and his nemesis, Percy Soames) just a little too square-jawed and handsome. Those who think of Helprin as a conservative first and a novelist second won't be surprised by his romanticization of turn-of-the-century New York or the messianic overtones of Peter Lake's story; the fantasy is always at heart a reactionary art form. But all that said, everything I loved about the book the first time through still holds true today. Prose artists like Helprin come along only once or twice in a generation, and Winter's Tale remains his highest stylistic achievement. His descriptions--the fog that hangs over Staten Island, Beverly's tubercular rosy glow, sleighing on a cold clear night, the thunder of hooves on cobblestones, a bridge made of light--still have the effect of altering how I see and think about the world around me. And I'll say it again: Peter Lake is one of the all-time great characters, on a par with Hamlet, Pip, Dorothea, Isabel Archer, Jay Gatsby and Mrs. Ramsey. Like Helprin's New York, the book's flaws may keep it earthbound, but in its glimpses of transcendence it remains as breathtaking as ever.