Word: reader
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Just as the reader, with more than 700 pages still to march, begins to worry about blisters, the youthful Alessandro takes over the narrative. Here, for a very large chunk of the novel's center, Helprin writes with riotous energy and $ sustained brilliance about boyhood, youth and war. There is a strange, dreamlike adventure in the Alps, when Alessandro at age nine or 10 is caught up in a mountain rescue, then in a preadolescent erotic tangle with an Austrian princess. Later there is a splendid silliness in which he taunts a couple of mounted carabinieri while riding his horse...
...later a professional journeyer meets boring people in tedious circumstances. Here the land-based pilgrim must lie entertainingly, which is hard work, or tell the ghastly truth. The writer who travels by boat need only conjure a storm, or describe his great relief that the weather is fine. The reader, charmed or alarmed, follows wide-eyed. Raban weathered bores effectively in Coasting, a wry account of a voyage around England in a small sailboat, and in Old Glory, in which he put-putted down the Mississippi in an aluminum skiff...
...rented a sailboat, and the wind is up, and banks of low nimbus clouds are swarming in from the northwest. Out of sight, the Key West highway is clogged with tourists, but that's their problem. Raban's narrative scuds toward the open sea, and the beguiled reader, as always at such moments, makes plans: sell the house, buy a boat. A case of salsa and a gallon of rum. How hard can it be to write travel books...
...this detail, such as moving the site of a conversation from her flat in New York City to a restaurant in California. The myth is that by relying so heavily on seemingly verbatim quotations, the journalist is functioning as a crystal-clear piece of glass through which the reader can see the subject whole and true. But if the quotes are the result of art and not tape recording, the whole genre needs rethinking...
There is no point in being too reverent about books. Mein Kampf was -- is -- a book. Still, some books have the virtue of being processed through an intelligence. Writers make universes. To enter that creation gives the reader some intellectual dignity and a higher sense of his possibilities. The dignity encourages relief and acceptance. The universe may be the splendid, twittish neverland of P.G. Wodehouse (escape maybe, but a steadying one) or Anthony Trollope's order, or Tolkien's. I know a married couple who got through a tragic time by reading Dickens to each other every night. Years...