The Pacific and Other Stories

From Publishers Weekly
As ambitious and imaginative as any of Helprin's past works (Memoir from Antproof Case; Winter's Tale; etc.), the 16 stories collected in the author's first book in nearly a decade are gloriously rich and varied. In "Perfection," Helprin's fabulist skills glitter as a Hasidic boy from 1958 Brooklyn makes a pilgrimage to "the house of Ruth" in the Bronx, believing that he must save Mickey Mantle and the "New York Yenkiss." Other tales explore loss, regret, retribution and time's passage, their exotic locations—Italy, France, Israel, the orange grove–era Pacific coast—imbuing them with exuberant life. In "Il Colore Ritrovato," a bookkeeper-turned-impresario, who years ago discovered one of the world's greatest (and unhappiest) opera singers, happens upon another untrained but perfect soprano and wrestles with his conscience about introducing her to the professional world. In "Monday," an honorable contractor willing to sacrifice other contracts and his own reputation to renovate the home of a woman whose husband was killed on September 11 learns "the power of those who had done right." "Passchendaele," a story of unrequited passion between a Canadian rancher and his neighbor's mute wife, is tender and moving, as are "Last Tea with the Armorers" and "Prelude," each demonstrating immense faith in the power of love. These are sturdy, rewarding stories from a master of the form. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Mark Helprin just might be the most romantic writer in America. The Pacific and Other Stories is rich in big, life-shaping notions (love, honor, duty, regret) filtered through the language of longing and nostalgia in such a way that the world takes on a kind of fairy-tale luster.Here are beautiful people doing beautiful things in beautiful places, all beautifully described. In "Il Colore Ritravato," an opera impresario traveling in Venice looks for redemption in the career of an unknown but beautiful soprano. In "Passchendaele," a Montana rancher pines for his neighbor's beautiful wife.And in the title story, set on the California coast during World War II, a beautiful woman named Paulette Ferry is hired as a precision welder at a factory that manufactures instruments for fighter planes. Her husband is soldiering in the south Pacific, and Paulette takes both pride and solace in her work. "The rhythm of the work seemed to signify something far greater than the work itself. The timing of her welds, the blinking of the arc . . . the generation of blinding flares and small pencil-shots of smoke: these acts, these qualities, and their progress, like the repetitions in the hymns that the women sang on the line, made a kind of quiet thunder that rolled through all things and that, in Paulette's deepest wishes, shot across the Pacific in performance of a miracle she dared not even name."There's no question that Helprin can write a ravishing sentence. He does it again and again throughout this book and has been doing it for a long time now (he's published two previous story collections and four novels, including Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War). The question is, what's the net effect of such a romantic vision of the world?Each of the 16 stories begins well enough, but Helprin has a tendency to resort, sometimes at the most crucial moment, to object lessons and melodramatic gestures. "Jacob Byer and the Telephone," for example, is about an itinerant teacher who wanders into a Russian city obsessed with a new invention called the telephone. The setup is fresh and funny, the place vividly described, Jacob Byer himself likable and interesting. The whole thing feels more like a fable than modern short fiction. Like a fable, however, the story leaves the reader with an all-too-simple moral -- in this case, about the dangers of replacing faith with technology:"He glanced back for the last time and thought that . . . the telephone would triumph . . . and spread victoriously over the whole world. Probably, after the first flush of enthusiasm, people would no longer think it divine. But having thought so, they would put a distance between them and all that was true, a distance that would perhaps be extended . . . until the gap was so great that only God could see across it." In a remarkable scene in "Mar Nueva," one of the strongest stories in the book, a young boy comes face-to-face with a ruthless dictator named Santos-Ott. Their exchange is noteworthy for its humor and poignancy, for what it imparts about both the dictator and the boy, and for the subtlety with which Helprin renders all of the above. It's followed closely, however, by a second meeting, except this time the boy's (beautiful) older sister is present, and within minutes she has engaged Santos-Ott in a heated political debate."I don't have power," says Santos-Ott, "because my portrait is on postage stamps. My picture is on postage stamps because my power was born with me."A few lines later, the sister replies, "You pervert logic for your own benefit. Perhaps because everyone is afraid of you, no one has corrected your error. Perhaps no one has even tried. Let me explain to you how you err."And she goes on to do just that. The issue here isn't that Helprin is wrong about technology or dictators (would anyone disagree?). It's only that, in some ways, a great deal less is revealed when any writer resorts to this kind of reduction.The Pacific and Other Stories is decidedly old-fashioned in both style and temperament but seems oddly fresh in Helprin's resistance to anything so quotidian as realism or irony. By the end of the collection I found myself not so much wishing that Helprin were less a sentimentalist, less heavy-handed in his portrayal of love and politics and human nature, as that I had it in me to see the world as he does -- a place where good and bad are easily recognized; where sadness carries the day from time to time but always evokes our better selves; a place, above all, where beauty reigns. Reviewed by Michael Knight Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Helprin, author of Ellis Island and A Winter’s Tale, brings to this collection his usual deep look into life, love, and war in prose as "glassy and smooth as amber" (Los Angeles Times). Yet, written over two decades, these stories befuddled a few critics. Some praised Helprin’s wise themes, character studies, dazzling prose, and detailed descriptions of how things, like baseball, work. Most agreed, however, that Helprin paints overly broad generalizations when it comes to people: honorable, brave men and beautiful women. "Jacob Byer and the Telephone," for example, has a fresh plot and protagonist, but a simple, emotionally unsatisfying moral at the end. Yet, even with faults, Helprin’s world still "takes on a kind of fairy-tale luster" (Washington Post). It’s just a matter of if you want it displayed in technicolor, or simplified in black and white. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Helprin, the author of such grandly artistic novels as Memoirs from an Antproof Case (1995), generates narrative electricity via the tension between the exactitude of his prose and the operatic drama and, in some cases, fantasia of his metaphor-spangled stories. A veteran of the Israeli armed forces and the British navy, and a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal, Helprin is a man of the world deeply concerned with valor, integrity, discipline, intelligence, and honor, themes explored with verve in this radiant collection. A British paratrooper carries out a nearly impossible mission; men fall irredeemably under the spell of beautiful women; and in the haunting title story, a woman works in an aircraft factory, waiting for her marine lieutenant husband to come home from the Pacific front. Helprin's values are traditional, but his imagination is unbounded, inspiring exuberantly satirical fables, such as "Perfection," in which a scrawny Hasidic boy goes to the "House of Ruth" to save the Yankees, and the rabbinical debate over the significance of a new technology in "Jacob Bayer and the Telephone." And then there is "Monday," Helprin's glorious story of one magnificent attempt to redress the grief of 9/11. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Entertainment Weekly, October 22, 2004
Helprin's range is staggering, but no more so than the...case he makes for the importance of honor. A


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Sixteen tales of war, love, the achingly beautiful past and the fallen present. It's been about a decade since his last novel (Memoir From Antproof Case, 1995), so Helprin tosses out a story collection, as if that will be enough. And it almost is. The opener, "Il Colore Ritrovato," is a graceful inversion of the expected, a good taste of what's to come-as an opera impresario tries to convince a young singer not to sign with him yet, as success could dull her gift. "A Brilliant Idea, and His Own" is a straightforward adventure, set in WWII Italy: A British forward fire observer critically injures himself parachuting behind German lines and struggles to stay alive to accomplish his mission. Smaller pieces are less resonant, like the title story, about a female welder who pines for her love serving in the Pacific, and "Sail Shining in White," about an aged retiree who sails into a massive hurricane, most likely to die but absolutely determined to live. The jewel here is the aptly titled "Perfection." In 1950s New York, it follows a 14-year-old Holocaust survivor who's given a divine mission: to save the Yankees from their slump. The absurd scene at the center of the story is oddly delightful: a slight boy in full Orthodox regalia, ignorant of baseball and everything modern, striding to the plate at Yankee Stadium and showing "Mickey Mental" how to hit home runs. Its magical vision of baseball's glorious design seems almost divine ("All was grace and perfection here, all just and redeemed, all prayer answered, ratios exact, rhythms perfect, laws obeyed"), the kind of thing W.P. Kinsella was once able to conjure at will. Helprin needs space to work his magic, room to build up steam, but evenin these short bursts, he often accomplishes what others take hundreds of pages to achieve.


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