“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.
