“Now, in my eight-second year, my allegiance is to ghosts.”
— Mark Helprin
So the unnamed 82-year-old narrator declares early on in Mark Helprin’s novel “Elegy in Blue” (Harry N. Abrams, 2026, 256 pages). He then proceeds to blend his present with his past, a life turned upside down by the murder of his beloved wife, the destruction by arson of nearly all that he owned, his wealth wiped away by a vengeful set of crazed parents and a legal system gone awry, and the challenge of battling an evil drug cartel that has set up shop in Brooklyn.
He’s lived a life in full. He spent his early years in a house on the Hudson, living modestly with his mother — his father has died in the fighting after the Normandy invasion — surrounded by valuable works of art his father had collected years earlier when paintings sold for a song in post-World War I Europe. From that idyllic boyhood, he and a group of eccentric friends founded an investment bank, which though off to a rocky start made him a man of means.
In his mid-thirties, living in Brooklyn and still struggling to make a go of the business, he meets an attorney, Clare Kennedy, with whom he instantly falls “recklessly but gently in love.” When it becomes apparent that she feels the same, they marry, have a son, and his life and days become a hymn to beauty and goodness. Later, the wars in the Middle East take the life of his son, and he and Clare are left bereft.
They are some 40 years married and still deeply in love when on a long walk they are passing a Jewish school when a Nazi-Hamas lunatic wades into the crowd of mothers and children, swinging a razor-sharp machete and intent on mass murder. The narrator responds by thwarting the attack, killing the murderer, but Clare is mortally wounded in the struggle.
The narrator goes into a sort of shock, disconnecting his phone and throwing his mail into the trash, drenched in memories of Clare. Yet manipulators of the news and social media cast the narrator as an out-of-control vigilante, and he becomes the target of other lunatics, including some Hamas supporters, who harass him, throw stones through the windows of his home, and eventually burn it to the ground.
Aided by a former colleague at the bank, the narrator settles into a small apartment in Brooklyn, left with his memories and his ghosts. Yet circumstances — a janitor in the building is threatened with death if he doesn’t soon turn over his teenage daughter to a drug lord — bring him one more opportunity to try and restore some balance of justice in the world.
But enough. I’ve probably given away more of the plot than necessary, yet some details of the story need inclusion for a look at what so attracted me to “Elegy in Blue.”
First, Helprin’s prose often reads like poetry, as it does in his other books. Here his lush descriptions of Brooklyn, of the physical and emotional landscape of his childhood, and especially of his love for Clare are for me words and sentences of beauty, whereas readers more accustomed to the customary mundane prose of contemporary fiction and to skimming online articles and social media may find Helprin’s descriptions roadblocks rather than pleasures. Here’s just one example:
“Rhapsody and elegy, tragedy and comedy: New York is like that and always has been. There’s something about this city of islands and rivers that braids together two such opposites until they are inextricable, and then you love them both and — forgive me or not if I cannot refrain from speaking of broken hearts — they break your heart. But in breaking it they resurrect it as well, and show you what you love enough to die for.”
As that passage indicates, “Elegy in Blue” is laced with comedy as well as tragedy. “When I was young, circuses and carnivals still had sideshows (indeed, there were still circuses and carnivals), but now that would just be everyday life.” Or this one, when the narrator is a boy and his mother owns a shack at the beach: “The water came from a cistern outside the house, and we used it sparingly. As in so many luxurious beach houses, we did have an outdoor shower: but ours was called rain.”
Perhaps best of all, at least in the opinion of your reviewer, who is five years past his biblically allotted three-score-and-ten, is Helprin’s portrait of the aged narrator: “He is a library, a treasure house of memories as vivid as if they were imprinted on the mind just that morning, as are so many elderly men and women.”
The memories are ghosts, but they are also as real as the day’s headlines or the coffee sipped at dawn. Here, for me and for the narrator, is the beauty that lies at the heart of having grown old, and loved, and lost:
“In recollection, all the things of those days are still alive. They are all I have and all I have ever wanted. Thus, I look forward to distant prospects straight up and into the dark, alluring sky. Perhaps by the grace of God the past will become more alive than the fading present, for there I’m with them, and Clare is young.”
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” minick0301@gmail.com.)