The book begins, “Call me Oscar Progresso. Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name.” While mocking Melville is a worthwhile endeavor and ought to become a legitimate major in several liberal arts colleges, Helprin uses this reference to Moby Dick for so much more than humor. His protagonist asserts that what his name is does not matter for in the end we are all the same. “You may run quadruple marathons and do one-arm handstands, but only blink, look up, and see yourself hobbling about like a bent insect half-crushed under a heavy heel. That’s me…” He encourages the reader to think of him or herself as someone intimately connected with him, someone who has laughed and loved with him and whether you are able to imagine this at the beginning of the book, by the end this man has become a apart of you in a way that only the great characters of literature can. This character who believes coffee is the substitute for a happy life and the root of all evil (ironically, I spilled coffee on my copy of the book), spends his childhood in an insane asylum and who robs a premier financial institution, is laugh out loud hilarious. But Helprin uses this humor to shove the truth about humanity down our laughing mouths. The character notes, “Because of his asthma, Che Guervara was addicted to yerba mate, a caffinate, and look what happened to him. There is no hope.” Yet, though 750,000 tons of coffee are continually consumed in Brazil alone, he never stops fighting. His spirit, in keeping with his identity, is truly our spirit the spirit of humanity. The spirit that Faulkner spoke of in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech , when he said he refused to accept the decline of man, because man will prevail. That even to the end, when the last bell tolls, man is obstinate continually fighting never defeated. Helprin’s character tells us, “To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith.” As his character lolls in the field of time, his narrative zig-zagging back forth through events in his life, which spanned the better part of the past century, he does so with grace, humor, insanity and stubborn adherence to the fight against coffee. In this empty calorie world of fluffy pastry literature, Helprin is bacon and cheddar cheese, the protein feeding our souls.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Greg Hagin
Has Helprin published anything recently?
His " A Winters Tale" is blindingly beautiful, much more inventive than Caleb Carr's The Alienist, or even (in film) Scorcese's Gangs of New York.