Jonathan Peto's Reviews > Winter's Tale

I read Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War a couple decades ago and enjoyed it. I remember marveling at his descriptive prowess and purchased this novel last winter. Its size, however, kept it on the shelf. I also had buyer’s remorse and wasn’t sure if I really felt like reading it, so some vague impression kept me away too. I kept gravitating to other books. Winter’s coming, I thought recently. If the story doesn’t fly by page 100, I’ll abandon it without regret...

One relief from the very start was the immediate confirmation that the description was detailed and sublime. Another reviewer mocked Helprin’s writing as overblown. I was prepared to feel the same way but didn’t, not at all. Helprin crafts sentences that often wrap around several lines of text, at least for a good deal of the book, yet they consistently and effortlessly synthesize into a single powerful image. He strings together a series of amazing sensations - tastes, sights, sounds, smells - and unites them at the end of the sentence or paragraph organically, without undue intellectual concentration on the part of the reader. Helprin may have built his similes like tables but the result, the effect, is art. I was often amazed. More importantly, they never or very rarely distracted from the story.

I want to emphasize this point so much that I will praise his simile-writing again. Have you ever been annoyed by an author who inserts too many similes into his or her writing? I’m willing to bet that Helprin’s prose contains more. Except his work. The amount of similes per page is sometimes astonishing, especially because none were jarring or ill-conceived and most were even beautiful.


Mrs. Gamely and Virginia could hear a ferocious jingling as billions of ice fragments shuffled together on the swells, sounding like the lost souls of all the insects that had ever lived.

The air was springlike. It conveyed the same buoyant pleasure as walking into a gathering of little children, arrayed like wildflowers, in their colorful hats and scarves.

Sawtoothed jets of flame roared up the stairs like a huge serpent that had come from the lake to search for the children.

Before reaching page 100, I began thinking of a recently read YA novel and writer: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor, a novel I enjoyed and writer I will read again. Helprin’s writing in Winter’s Tale reminded me that my criticisms of Daughter of Smoke & Bone are not necessarily about things that inevitably lead to flaws. I took issue with how Taylor structured part of her novel, that a large section of it was flashback. Helprin begins in a present. When he resorts to long flashbacks though, it worked. I cared what was happening even if it was past; I was immersed. Also, like two characters in Daughter of Smoke & Bone, characters in Winter’s Tale fall in love at first sight but Helprin pulls it off. I believed it, often entirely; I bought in. Maybe that was in part due to his description, which is not simply descriptive but is world-building, myth-making, and historical.

Published in 1983, I felt this novel foreshadowed Neil Gaiman in at least one way: the treatment of setting. In Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman’s London contains a shadow London. Winter’s Tale lacks that but its New York City is not our New York City, now or in the past. I have to admit that that disappointed me, though I eventually accepted it. Do not read Winter’s Tale if you’re looking to inhabit New York City for a time. There is magic in Helprin’s New York. Unspoken but palpable magic, powerful and fantastic, but not in a way that replicates or mirrors or even channels the atmosphere of the real New York, not in my experience anyway, though later sections of the book did seem to cut closer and closer to a paradoxical representation of reality.

A horse embodies some of Helprin’s magic (and a cloud front). Since I am not close to horses (or cloud fronts) and do not know horses, it did not necessarily work for me entirely, deeply, but again, I eventually accepted it. Like the horse, other elements of the story did not immediately click, especially at the beginning, but enough did. We begin with Peter Lake, a thief. People are after him and we learn why. The story digresses and we learn of Peter Lake’s upbringing and background as well as that of Pearly Soames, who wants Peter dead.

So there is plenty of excitement and suspense embedded in Helprin’s beautiful, knowledgeable description and world-building. It felt long, but I was eagerly turning pages most of the time.

I reached page 200 and assumed the book was completely about Peter Lake. I’m a fool. With over 500 pages left, of course other characters (and time periods) would and did emerge. A single mother from the countryside ends up in the big city, a son of fortune goes it alone. He encounters the single mom’s mother and offers to help her. Their stories connect to the first, the one with Peter Lake... Then even more characters are introduced. Connections abound. It is not dizzying or confusing, some characters get more attention than others. Peter Lake even returned after 200 pages... This is what long novels, epic novels, do, I guess; this is what interests literary novelists. In a way, Winter’s Tale is a precursor to some of David Mitchell’s work, except Helprin’s style remains consistent as the narrative traverses various characters and their interconnections through a century or so, mainly in New York City. Helprin shares Mitchell’s interest in tying disparate bits and pieces together, though what ties all these events and characters together is not obvious, not to me anyway, though that’s not necessarily bad. It is why some may describe the book as plotless, or at best, unfocused. At first sight, Helprin’s bits and pieces are less incongruous than Mitchell’s. Nevertheless, they are just as puzzling/puzzle-worthy as Mitchell’s, no lie. Ultimately, I enjoyed what I gleaned but am too lazy to be the ambitious reader Helprin envisions, even though I am interested in many of his themes, such as time. Perhaps, the presentation, the structure, fizzle-failed me. I began to lose interest in two of the characters, one I haven’t mentioned yet who is the editor of a newspaper, one whose changes I found daunting, though the story is so complex there were interesting things rolling around all the time, to the very end.


Given the fact that Mark Helprin was a speech writer for Bob Dole and is apparently a conservative commentator, I am surprised that the vision he lays out did not raise my hackles, and I was on the lookout! Someone named Benjamin Nugent noted in an article in N+1 Magazine that Helprin may be one of the only Republicans who writes literary novels. ( https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/o... ) He claims that Winter’s Tale reflects Helprin’s conservative politics and even states that “It’s a lyrical, extensively researched, occasionally polemical Republican epic.” He seems surprised that others don’t mention or notice.

The whole Republican epic bit went over my head. Mostly. Knowing it is supposedly there did lead to a search for evidence. What I found most of the time was mild and circumstantial, such as the fierce independence of some country folk who rescue the stranded passengers of a train and provide for them in a very harsh winter. I suppose the point could be that their actions were the true expression of a giving spirit that permeates independent, hard-working communities of wealth-generators and therefore demonstrates the “needless” largess of government “handouts”, but if that was Helprin’s intention, it was not heavy-handed. Within these pages, there are a few too many self-made, wealthy men whose talents and hard work always result in things working out, no matter how tough the initial going. These self-made men are also generous to others and appreciative of society. That, in my opinion, could be construed as evidence of a “polemical Republican epic”, but many novels feature characters who are luckier than most of us, so I did not usually find the presence of those characters overly preachy or over-bearing. This passage from late in the novel did sound like it could be an excuse to do nothing when injustice is on the rise: We learn that justice may not always follow a just act, that justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected, that a miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

In general, I presume Helprin’s respect for the poor and downtrodden in Winter’s Tale is heartfelt and sincere. His enthusiasm and respect for all of humanity, for nature, for the future and the past, is evident (and at odds with the shrill lunacy of his political party, especially in regards to problems like climate change). If more Republicans had the stamina to write literary fiction, the required contemplation might lead to ideas and political platforms with substance. It would be a good thing, even for the rest of us. Maybe the political discourse in the US would grow saner and more hopeful. I therefore urge all writing teachers to coddle the young Republican writers in your classrooms, if any. Mark Helprin must be so, very, very lonely.