Sophomore Slump

By Stefan Kanfer

WINTER'S TALE

by Mark Helprin

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 673 pages;

$14.95

Even before publication, the word on Winter's Tale was astonishment. In an eight-day auction, nine publishers bid for the manuscript; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich acquired the rights for $250,000 plus a $100,000 promotional budget, plus a $100,000 option on Author Mark Helprin's next novel. In a time of recession in the publishing industry, the purchase seemed profligate. But it has already begun to pay off. A first printing of 50,000 has disappeared rapidly, and the book has already made the bestseller list. Yet all these achievements pale beside Helprin's purple aura of selfimportance.

Winter's Tale charts the adventures of Peter Lake, a mythic figure who progresses from waif to demigod, from the late 19th century to the third millennium, preserved by mysterious forces, pursued by the forces of evil, accompanied by his flying steed Athansor. The locale of his escapade is a New York City that neither was nor will be, decorated with baroque snowstorms, peopled by feral children and avaricious millionaires, blighted by the spirits of the poor and, ultimately, illuminated by a distant vision of the Just City. There a bridge will be built, reaching from Manhattan to the vault of heaven.

On the journey, Helprin, 36, strains for comparisons to his 19th century master. The names of characters could have been culled from the pages of The Pickwick Papers: the Rev. Mootfowl, Pearly Soames, Rupert Binky, Daythril Moobcot, Hardesty Marratta, Jesse Honey. The portraits of the huddled poor, the satirically named newspapers (the Evening Ghost, the Morning Whale) all echo Dickens' works. But it is Oliver without a Twist, Chuzzle minus the wit.

Helprin's previous fiction (Refiner's Fire, A Dove of the East) has been characterized by precision and nuance. Here, gestures become poses, and narratives grow windy and precious. A woman "sweeps the pantry with her motile and patibulary eyes." "On infinite meadows in the black, creatures made of misty light tossed their manes in motionless eternal swings that passed through the stars like wind sweeping through wildflowers." The novel's conclusion is a collector's item: "What of Peter Lake, you may ask? .. . Was he able to stop time? ... At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart." Meanwhile, similes and metaphors are platitudes or worse: the city draws a horse to it "like a magnet"; Peter is "wound up like a spring"; another character is "putty in the hands" of a widow; New York looks "like a piece of flashing jewelry."

Occasionally one of Helprin's set pieces achieves a lyric quality: a ride on the local Pegasus, a description of the Lake of the Coheeries, where a fast freeze of heavy blue water has left a place of endless glass, as perfect as an astronomer's mirror. Almost all of the wintry scenes in the novel are palpable; the cold is as much a character as Peter himself. But the connecting sentences seem to have tumbled from the pages of the Kahlil Gibran calendar: "We are falling now, and our swift unobserved descent will bring us to life that is blooming in the quiet of another time."

Because of its Arthurian hero, its aspartame mysticism and its prating about "the language of the heart," Winter's Tale is a prime candidate for campus cult book, alongside Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Prophet. Fair enough; an epic so manifestly in awe of itself belongs strictly to the sophomores and the sophomoric at heart. --By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.