Helprin, Mark 1947– - Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard

Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard

Mark Helprin's originality is hard to explain, just as it is hard sometimes to understand. But perhaps understand is too gross or aggressive a word for "Ellis Island and Other Stories." Mr. Helprin's style is odd, mysteriously accented, as if he were a foreigner imperfectly acquainted with English. But then as we follow him, we begin to wonder whether the foreignness is not in things themselves, intrinsic to them. He writes like a translator, only it is not language he translates from one frame of reference to another, but people and circumstances. Nothing is familiar in his stories: he is interested only in the fabulous, the borderline between perception and hallucination, knowing and wishing. His characters exist in a state of sweet anxiety. (p. 164)

In "A Room of Frail Dancers," a weary Israeli army veteran returning from the front says that "fighting in the desert, he had finally understood...
(read more)