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Occasionally one of Helprin's set pieces achieves a lyric quality: a ride on the local Pegasus, a description of the Lake of the Coheeries, where a fast freeze of heavy blue water has left a place of endless glass, as perfect as an astronomer's mirror. Almost all of the wintry scenes in the novel are palpable; the cold is as much a character as Peter himself. But the connecting sentences seem to have tumbled from the pages of the Kahlil Gibran calendar: "We are falling now, and our swift unobserved descent will bring us to life that is blooming in the quiet of another time."
Because of its Arthurian hero, its aspartame mysticism and its prating about "the language of the heart," Winter's Tale is a prime candidate for campus cult book, alongside Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Prophet. Fair enough; an epic so manifestly in awe of itself belongs strictly to the sophomores and the sophomoric at heart. —By Stefan Kanfer