I used to love Mark Helprin. Yes, he's a Republican, yes, he was a speechwriter for Bush I... but he could write like nobody else. Winter's Tale remains one of my favorite books. Such a blend of whimsy and humor and tragedy and fantasy and romance and the big city... so when I saw that he had a new one out in paperback, Freddy and Fredericka, I picked it up.
I haven't been so annoyed by a book in I don't know how long.
The whimsy and fantasy is still there, and the romance, and the humor... well, maybe the humor is part of the problem. Some passages are hysterically funny, and some are just witlessly dumb (a dog named Pha-Kew is involved in one scene, and misunderstandings oh-so-predictably ensue.)
The story? Well, it's a thinly veiled satire of Charles and Diana. Why now? I have no idea. Anyway, they're sent packing off to America on a kind of "Outward Bound" crash course in roughing it for royals. You can imagine.
The last straw has come about three-fifths of the way in, where a hapless politician enters the story. His name is Dewey Knott (more bad puns! Oh boy!), the GOP nominee for president, running against the slick, helmet-haired President Self (I give you one guess who that's supposed to be).
Anyway, the result is I have to endure passages like this:
What was the point of fighting when you were forty points behind? The point was in the fight itself. He refused to give up, he was so dogged, because he was an honest man who had chosen a dishonest way of life, and, out of a sense of honour, patriotism, and obligation, he had slogged through that life, hating its every falsity, and hating himself when it overtook him. Losing was, therefore, the kind of punishment that purified him and restored the balance of honour that he needed to survive. He was grateful, then, that for every form of distress. President Self had no idea of anything except that he had to be powerful and adored. Dewey understood that having power and being adored was, as Dewey himself would have put it, " a bucket of shit." He was in it for the suffering.
I've checked the copyright on the book. It was published in 2005. At that date — even a year or two before, when Helprin might still have been writing the book — such a Republican character seems like a stretch at best. The author would have to have been clasping his hands over his ears and chanting "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" to be able to pull that one off with any sincerity. (In which case, I'm not sure how he managed to reach the keyboard at the same time.)
Anyway, I'm going to keep going, but this is not one I'm planning to keep or reread when I'm done.
Oh, and the New York Times has two reviews of it, one favorable, and one not (though the latter didn't seem to be as offended as I was — just unimpressed.)
