(4 of 5)
Mark Helprin has the knack of creating exquisite tensions without disturbing the surface of his stories. And he understands the fabulist's task: "Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art."
This insight concludes Tamar, the story of a man who is late for a dinner party and made to sit with the children, one of whom is a beauty on the brink of womanhood. Exquisite tension, indeed. Elsewhere, a man numbed by tragedy climbs out of himself by scaling an Alp. The purpose: to recapture his humanity "in a crucible of high drama." Humanity sinks in Letters from the "Samantha, " in which the captain of a British sailing vessel rescues a reddish ape from the Indian Ocean but throws it back when the sad, manlike creature disrupts ship's business. The captain insists that the ape had no meaning and his fate no moral significance. The reader should have no trouble getting the author's drift: when the freight must be moved, the strange and rare are always expendable.
Ellis Island, the long title story, is an inspired amusement about the immigrant experience. Helprin's America is full of useful surprises, rewards and opportunities to change identities as easily as one changes socks. The protagonist, a promising and eager young writer from Eastern Europe, ricochets toward his dream of happiness. The scenes, expansive and fantastic, create an air of giddy expectancy. One would not have been surprised to find Paul Bunyan chased by Marc Chagall with a can of spray paint.
LOITERING WITH INTENT by Muriel Spark Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 217 pages; $12.95
"Dear Miss Spark, How do you do " wrote Evelyn Waugh to Muriel Spark in 1960, after delighting in three of her early novels.
Today, 13 clever and elegant novels later, the question still stands. Loitering With Intent may be as close to an answer as Spark intends to give. Her heroine, Fleur Talbot, is an English writer not unlike herself starting out in a London bed-sitter three decades ago. She takes a job as secretary to a dotty group calling itself the Autobiographical Association, and quickly progresses from helping the members with grammar to embellishing and inventing the very lives they are recounting.
All this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease."
IN SHELLY'S LEG by Sara Vogan Knopf; 248 pages; $10.95