Freddie And Fredericka

The reviews are coming in for Mark Helprin’s first new novel in ten years – “Freddy and Fredericka” and they’re very, very good. This one from Joseph Bottum;

There is a peculiar rule of literature that the most brutal satires seem to be written by conservatives, or at least out of a conservative impulse. Think of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” or Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” or Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” or Tom Sharpe’s “The Throwback.” With his lyrical prose and epic imagination in such books as “Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great War,” “Memoir From Antproof Case” and last year’s “The Pacific and Other Stories,” Mr. Helprin has proved himself a major fiction writer — and perhaps the only one of his generation it is plausible to call a genuine conservative.
But for all that, “Freddy and Fredericka” is far from brutal. Mr. Helprin’s first full novel in a decade, it is, in the end, a rather sweet book about kings and queens and why human beings might sometimes need them. About America, as well, and why human beings might sometimes need it, too.

Emily Carter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune;

As a wordsmith and a stylist, Helprin is perhaps unmatched in his easeful way with his mother tongue in all its manifestations. He has used his voice well here, but more importantly his ear. From the frilly Victorian embedded clauses of Henry James to the whimsical characterization of Tom Robbins and other “zany” North American writers, Helprin swerves effortlessly through the ages of English literature to create a world at once completely artificial and utterly believable within its well-set parameters.

I think it’s time to kick start my Amazon wish list.