In Sunlight and in Shadow (Helprin) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Passionate, earnest, nostalgic, and romantic.... Throughout the novel he splashes down paeans to virtue and beauty you’d have to be heartless not to enjoy.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review


In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, the new novel is a spiritual pendant to Winter's Tale, and every bit as extraordinary.... Even the most stubbornly resistant readers will soon be disarmed by the nobility of the novel's sentiments and seduced by the pure music of its prose.... The harmonization of the dual climaxes results in passages so gorgeous and stirring that I was moved to read them out loud. That is fitting, because the writing throughout In Sunlight and in Shadow sounds as though it were scored to some great choral symphony. Harry himself says it best: "My view is that literature should move beyond opinion, where music already is, and old age, if we're lucky, may lead.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


Mark Helprin's juicy and entertaining new novel...delivers a rich portrait of postwar America, and a late, lengthy flashback to Harry's war experiences brings some much needed ballast to the bigger picture.... In Sunlight and in Shadow is a sensational and perfectly gripping novel: a love story, a tribute to the fighting spirit of World War II, a hymn to the majesty of New York, and a cranky, pedantic elegy for the world that used to be.
Rodney Welch - Washington Post


Helprin is gifted at writing about war—not just combat, but the vastly complex and contradictory world that surrounds combat—and the passages describing Harry’s wartime experiences are...lyrical, thrilling and at times astonishing.... In Sunlight and in Shadow, like all of Helprin’s novels, exists to remind us that...it is sometimes wiser and more fulfilling to cherish our deepest ideals than to mock them.
Chicago Tribune


Prose seems too mundane a term for Helprin’s extravagant way with words and emotions.... Post-World War II Manhattan isn’t merely the backdrop...it’s a magical urban landscap.... His penchant for providing an epiphany on nearly every page could become wearying. But just when you think In Sunlight and in Shadow might float away into the ether, lofted by the sheer beauty of his sentences, he brings it down to earth with a shrewd comment on the speech patterns of Catherine’s ultra-privileged social class, or a vividly specific account of the production process at the West 26th Street loft that houses Harry’s high-end leather goods business.... In Helprin’s rhapsodic rendering.... In Sunlight and in Shadow is at heart a romance, not just the romance of two attractive young people but the romance of life itself.
Los Angeles Times


New York, New York, it's a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin's new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It's got great polarized motifs which the gifted novelist weaves into a grand, old-fashioned romance, a New York love story.... Helprin does several things extraordinarily well: He fights for and wins our close sympathy for his characters, even as he delivers a full-throated rendering of life at war and life at peace (with a little of each in the other). He also pays wonderful attention to the natural world, such as that New York spring that opens the story, the changing of seasons, dawn in France and winter in Germany during the war, such domestic matters as 30 minutes of kisses, and the rue and wonder of a great love affair. I was desperately disappointed, though, by the end of this grandly charming and deeply affecting novel—but only because it ended.
Alan Cheuse - NPR


Three decades after his seminal Winter’s Tale, Helprin offers another sprawling novel in which New York City is the participatory backdrop of a love story that begins as an American idyll only to be vexed by a legion of postwar anxieties. One day in 1946, Harry Copeland—recently of the 82nd Airborne and heir to his father’s leather goods company—spots Catherine Hale, a well-heeled songstress with a Bryn Mawr pedigree. The two fall immediately in love, despite the objections of Catherine’s powerful fiancé, and Catherine’s career is savaged in the fallout of this star-crossed affair, which, from Penn Station to the Ritz and back to Harry’s heroics behind enemy lines, swells to operatic grandeur over the course of 700 pages, drawing specters like anti-Semitism and the Mafia into its orbit and concluding with a desperate, violent scheme that will bring Harry’s wartime expertise to bear on his sense of justice. And yet, neither love nor New York has ever seemed less complicated: despite excellent set pieces, Helprin’s prose is often ham-fisted, his characters thin, and his invocations of Gotham Americana jingoistic. Still, there’s fun to be had, particularly when Gatsbyesque descriptions of “the great financial houses” run for pages, but subtlety is not the author’s strong suit, and the lack of moral ambiguity in his larger-than-life characters registers as a missed opportunity.
Publishers Weekly


Acclaimed novelist Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War) has written a tale of two individuals who meet by chance on New York City's Staten Island Ferry and fall in love forever. When Harry meets Sally, uh, Catherine, he pursues her until she rather quickly falls in love with him. She's a fabulously wealthy budding actress whose career seems thwarted owing to suspiciously bad reviews, while Harry, who has recently returned from active duty in Europe after World War II, is struggling to make a go of it with the leather goods business he inherited from his deceased dad even as he faces a shakedown by the mob. Both main characters are attractive, and plot and setting are well drawn. But the tale is about twice as long as it needs to be. At times the romance here seems to be the author's love of his own writing, with infelicitous consequences: "[T]he buses running along the avenues [were] like unhappy buffalo inexplicably tamed to their routes." Verdict: For readers who enjoy a rich, dense stew and won't notice that it is at times too thick to stir. —Edward Cone, New York
Library Journal


(Starred review.) In this prodigious, enfolding saga of exalted romance in corrupt, postwar New York, resplendent storyteller Helprin creates a supremely gifted and principled hero. Helprin’s suspenseful, many-stranded plot is unfailingly enthralling. The sumptuous settings are intoxicating.
Booklist


Elegant, elegiac novel of life in postwar America, at once realistic and aspirational, by the ever-accomplished Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War, 1991, etc.). Harry Copeland is a sturdy-looking man, so much so that a wise aunt likens him to a young Clark Gable, to which he replies, "For Chrissakes, Elaine, when he was young, without the mustache, Clark Gable looked like a mouse." There's nothing mousy about Harry, though he does share Gable's burden of tragedy. But that is far from his mind when he lays eyes on Catherine Thomas Hale on a New York ferry and is stopped in his tracks.... A fine adult love story—not in the prurient sense, but in the sense of lovers elevated from smittenness to all the grown-up problems that a relationship can bring.
Kirkus Reviews