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 the sad attenuated glances in Renaissance paintings, a meekness and resignation oppressed by full and radiant glory." Of his wife who has left him, he remembers that at one time they "had been thoroughly excited by form, whether of dancers, a painting, the sweep of a sentence or the slope of a roof."
This is a free excerpt of 202 words. There are 343 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Helprin, Mark 1947–: Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard Access Pass.
