Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
Small Expectations
By Josh Rubins
Winter's Tale
by Mark Helprin
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 673 pp., $14.95
Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
Knopf, 228 pp., $13.95
With a white horse serenely flying through an evening-blue, star-flecked sky, far above a Manhattan skyline, the book jacket for Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale is certainly one of the prettiest of the year. The prose inside is pretty too. Twinkling images assembled from a palette heavy on blue and 'swirling gold.' Periodic clusterings around such inspirational buzzwords as 'light' and 'dreams' and 'magic' and 'heart.' And if the cover art foreshadows the style of this gargantuan cotton-candy novel, the title poised between horse and skyline suggests the allusive, striving nature of the themes to come: Shakespeare's romance of resurrection will be only the most conspicuous swatch in a patchwork of Renaissance fairy tale, Victorian saga, Vonnegutian fable, and dreamy surrealism in the Latin American manner.
Review, 2688 words
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