This week our favorite book reviewer divulges her favorite author. Jen confesses Mark Helprin is her choice and takes us deep into The Pacific … to prove the point. She says this book “moved her to tears in its unadulterated glory,” which translates roughly as “Go forth and read [it.]”
If I were to choose – well, I sort-of do – my favorite writer would be Mark Helprin.
When A Winter’s Tale came out, a book reviewer for The New York Times said that he was almost afraid to write his review for fear of not doing the book justice. I empathize. Truly.
The Pacific and Other Stories (The Pacific) moved me to tears in its unadulterated beauty.
Mark Helprin is my favorite kind of writer. He is highly educated* and attuned to the gifts prevalent in the world around him. The pain, the joy, it all works in synch and through his eyes, it is a wonder.
The Pacific is a collection of short stories. Many have been published in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire and The Wall Street Journal. Each is a treasure. As finky as that sounds, it is true. Reading them is like finding a diamond in the sandbox.**
I was entranced by MONDAY and Perfection in particular. MONDAY is about a gift. An exceptionally heartfelt transcendent gift given to a 9/11 widow by her contractor. The beauty, compassion and honor in this gift made me clutch the book to my chest. Honor is a very undervalued trait and Helprin manifests it in spades.
PERFECTION is a once in a blue moon story. The cleverness is almost unsurpassed. A small, holocaust-surviving Hasidic boy playing ball with the Yankees. The Yenkiss! Mickey Mantle and this boy change history through the power of God. Upon seeing a ball fly out over the stadium off over the Atlantic, the manager is stunned. “Stengel dropped to his knees and said “ Holy cow”, more softly than people usually say holy cow, and he kept repeating it, as if he were in conversation with himself, a conversation limited to those two words spoken with different emphasis and intonation…”holy cow. Ho-ly cow. Ho-ly cow! Holy cow? Holy…cow! Ho-ly ca-ow? Holy? Cow? and so on, quietly, madly.” It is remarkable and hilarious. Helprin’s dry, clever humor is the pinnacle to which we all should aspire.
The Pacific is a collection that changes your outlook on the world around you for the better. If we read him often enough, maybe it could stick with us. It should. The differences in our lives for appreciating the thinly-veiled, splenderous gravitas of the world in which we live would be limitless.
Read Mark Helprin and open your eyes.
* Harvard, Princeton and Oxford.
** Not that you could pay me money to search through mine…