National Review - October 30, 2017

It can be argued, and no doubt will be,

that Jules Lacour is an improbable fig-

ment from the depths of Helprin’s psy-

che. Seventy-four years old and

white-haired, Jules is still fit and athletic,

working out on the river and in the gym.

His wife died long ago of cancer, and he

feels guilt because he could have been

with her at the moment of her death, but

for no good reason he wasn’t. The

women he meets are invariably young

and attractive and he falls impulsively

for them, only to find that the memory of

his wife obliges him to remain a lifelong

widower. Seemingly, love has to be

understood as full-time devotion even

when or if the costs are high.

Jules’s father was a cellist by profes-

sion, and Jules takes after him, being a

musician who describes himself primar-

ily as a Maître who teaches cello and

piano in the Sorbonne faculty of music.

His pupils are a small corps of great

musicians. He tells them, “Quite simply,

and make of it what you will: Music

is the voice of God.” Furthermore, “I

know theory but I teach to the sound and

the emotion.” Johann Sebastian Bach’s

Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren is an emo-

tional piece he often plays when alone.

He also composes music that “isn’t

modern and isn’t in demand—to say the

T

HISis a very ambitious novel,

to be read at many levels and

thought about for a long time.

Mark Helprin is his own mas-

ter, telling a story that is in part a thriller

and in part a reflection on the way of the

world, its rights and its wrongs. In

intention, he is closer to Victor Hugo or

Alexandre Dumas than to any contem-

porary novelist I know of.

The choice of Paris as a setting, and

French men and women as protagonists,

tends toward fable. Descriptions in the

freshest of prose of the Seine with the Île

aux Cygnes and the Bir-Hakeim Bridge,

the Place des Vosges, the Tuileries, and

the stately mansions of Saint-Germain-

en-Laye convey quite enough authenti -

city. Naming the several buildings of the

Salpêtrière hospital and stations on the

RER, the rapid-transport system, looks

like overloading.

At the outset of the novel, the path of

our hero, Jules Lacour, crosses the path

of Jack, a big-shot corporation executive

who addresses him as “Jewels” and dan-

gles before him the prospect of earning

an urgently required fortune but then

does not deliver. In Jules’s mind, “it was

always tempting to see Americans as

half-baked idiots.” So much for the

United States, then. A minor character

has similar scorn for her own country,

saying, “What is France but a once mag-

nificent house now occupied by igno-

rant squatters.”

SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 43

Paris in the Present Tense, by Mark Helprin

(Overlook, 400 pp., $28.95)

least.” At the same time, Helprin, or

rather Jules, his doppelgänger, has evi-

dently had a wide literary education, and

refers to, among others, Dante, Croce,

Colette, John Betjeman, Cavafy, Babar

the Elephant, and, not least, Hamlet.

Twice he lets drop the recondite infor-

mation that Rilke published poems in a

trade magazine for butchers. “Beautiful”

is the adjective that crops up repeatedly

in respect of all the arts, even Le Nôtre’s

landscape gardening. In whatever form,

then, the pursuit of beauty is another

absolute. One of the women expresses

Helprin’s philosophy when she says,

“Nature has the talent to soften, forgive,

and remake, to create something beauti-

ful out of our mistakes, paradoxes, and

counterpoints—even when it comes to

you invisibly.”

A chapter of intense narrative power

recounts what happened to Jules imme-

diately after his birth in 1940. Jews, the

Lacours had been fully assimilated,

and after the outbreak of war their

hope was merely to stay alive. Jules’s

parents fled from Paris with their baby

as the Wehrmacht marched into the

city. In the chaos of the fall of France,

they ended up in Reims. Courageous

Catholic strangers hid them in the attic

of their house. During his first four

We do not live in the shadow of the pyramids,

or of the great cathedrals, or of the Eiffel Tower,

or of the Titanic, or of cities abandoned

or destroyed, or of ancient graveyards,

sometimes unearthed by highway construction,

or of more modern graveyards, closer to home,

but we pass through these shadows

with some often unstated sense of their presence;

a passage that at first seems nearly random,

an anecdotal awareness of whatever

sense of the culture into which we are born

rises up into the enterprise of that day’s living;

a self-serving illusion of coherence

cannot be dismissed, nor may it

be fairly embraced; we hold neither the light

nor the shadow, but live them both,

a passage making its pattern, day and night,

sunrise defiant of the rubble, whatever its form.

—WILLIAMW. RUNYEON

WE DO NOT LIVE IN THE SHADOW

A Fable

From a

Master

DAVID PRYCE-JONES

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