In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin
In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 703 pages.
Describing everything from a half-hour sitcom to a dismal political failure (or, alas, “fail”) the word “epic” seems to get more work than a left-handed reliever. Yet the vast and varied canon of Western literature hasn’t offered a memorable epic poem for several centuries. Nevertheless, an occasional modern and contemporary work can feature the the requisites of the genre as outlined by R. W. Chambers.* Arguably, Mark Helprin’s sweeping novel, In Sunlight and In Shadow is chockablock with “amplitude, depth, and exclusiveness.”
There’s no nonsense about an “anti-hero,” in this novel: Harry Copeland is a worthy champion as preternaturally stalwart as Beowulf. A former paratrooper who has led an elite cadre through the D-Day invasion, he is well-equipped to confront a number of post-war difficulties, primarily the crisis within the family business, a high-end leather goods company besieged by a crime lord shaking down the firm for protection money.
His life is further complicated, though gloriously so, through the love of his life, Catherine Hale, a poor little rich girl with extraordinary maturity well beyond her twenty-something years. Catherine has problems of her own. Her dominating fiancé, Victor, has been sexually abusing her since she has been a teenager, though the author never really explains why Victor’s crime is kept secret from both the authorities and Catherine’s apparently loving parents. Her prodigious singing talent soars in a Broadway musical, but sabotage threatens to stall out her promising career.
Harry and Catherine meet cute on the Staten Island Ferry and almost immediately begin a relationship that borders on the mystical, the couple’s conversation on a lofty plane well beyond the chatter found in forties-style romantic movies. Catherine and most of the secondary female characters are perched on a sky-high pedestal. Except for a couple of society snobs and artsy poseurs, you’ll find none of the so-called misogyny, a charge often hurled at white male writers, such as that by David Foster Wallace toward John Updike. With Helprin, nearly every woman is a goddess.
The ancillary male characters are either good or bad, a few with some gray shading. Catherine’s wealthy father is genial and accepting, while Venderamé, the mob boss, is as menacing as Grendel. In the extended war flashback, Helprin presents highly-detailed character studies of the men who served under his leadership and later serve key roles in the engrossing plot. Another important character enters the scene as Harry and Catherine rescue a man as he stumbles around the back roads of Long Island after wrecking his pleasure boat in a storm. This mysterious figure is involved in a super-secret, para-government espionage agency; Vanderlyn is instrumental in supporting Harry fight back against his peacetime enemies. (As an aside, there is an intriguing use of the letter “V”in characters’ names – Victor, Venderamé, Vanderlyn - “V” as in Victory, perhaps?)
The city of New York and its environs must also be considered a character in the novel. As
the title suggests, “sunlight and shadow” serve as dominant motifs in descriptions, not merely, as other reviews have suggested, a line from the song “Danny Boy.” Helprin’s descriptions are so painstakingly accurate, you can trace place names and routes with a map. As shown by other works actually written in the era, New York immediately after the Second World War was at its cultural apex, full of a sense of renaissance.
When this novel was first published in December of 2012, the Washington Post gave it a mostly positive review; nevertheless, the reviewer didn’t pass up the chance to mention Helprin’s supposedly politically conservative views. I didn’t detect such in his masterpiece, Winter’s Tale ** nor in this particular novel, in which people of an apparently lower social and economic rank, i.e. folks who have to work for a living, are seldom depicted without inherent dignity. The exceptions perhaps are a brusque subway worker and an abrasive waitress, both of whom are stereotypically “rude Noo Yawkers,” not at all true today and probably not even in the late 40s and early 50s.
You could, however, make a case for Helprin as conservative most strongly in the war section. Even though it does not gloss over the omnipresent “hurry up and wait” milieu of the military bureaucracy, the war section celebrates Heroism with a capital “H” – self-sacrifice, devotion if not to duty then to the survival of one’s buddies. Above all is the necessity of stepping up and doing the right thing, a crowning achievement of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” of which Harry Copeland is the fictional paragon held up there, maybe, in contrast with the namby-pamby, coddled generation of today. Though the novel reflects Helprin’s evident copious research both on the details of the battlefield as well as post-war ambiance, it’s easy to look back and project comparisons.“Hindsight”-as Billy Wilder was the first to say-"is always 20-20.”
Attentive readers will see the ending coming, not so much through the well-dropped hints--not unlike those in The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard–but more so through the prevailing atmosphere,set up by the novel’s subtle though consistent tone. This, along with Helprin’s elegant prose, is a compelling reason to read the book in its entirety.
One final aspect of the comparison of this novel to a classical epic: while not at all relying on a “deus ex machina” or even fate, the notion of a supreme being permeates the entire novel. The fact that Harry is Jewish is mentioned, though his religion is tangential to the novel’s majestic theme. Going far beyond mere “spirituality,” the inherent mysticism (in sunlight, as well as shadow) derives from a Deist notion of God, Who has set the eternal clock with the expectation that we mere mortals will wind it --occasionally beyond the limits of temporal maintenance by transcending ephemeral existence with pure love. This is an epic, in the truest sense of the word.
*
This would be Robert Wilson Chambers(1874-1942), not Robert William Chambers(1865-1933.) Wilson Chambers was a British colleague of Tolkien, whereas Brooklyn native William Chambers was the author of “The King in Yellow,” one of the references in the celebrated first season of True Detective.
**
I mean the original novel. Please steer clear of the movie version.
