Cosmos Without Caffeine

"Now you may wonder how I can jump so quickly from the holy to the profane in this, my narrative, but in life it happens all the time." Thus says the protagonist of Mark Helprin's latest novel, but it might as well be Helprin himself speaking. In all his previous work, especially his majestic A Soldier of the Great War and his visionary Winter's Tale, Helprin has shown an uncanny and unflagging capacity to move with power and grace through the entire range of reality, human and divine. Even more striking, the holy and the profane coexist effortlessly in his work, not as a mere literary contrivance, but as something directly perceived.

Yet Memoir from Antproof Case is also artistry, and fun, of a high order. The speaker of the above words introduces himself in the opening sentence with a wacky echo of Moby Dick: "Call me Oscar Progresso." In fact, that is a pseudonym of an eighty-year-old American hiding in Brazil and consigning his memoirs to an antproof case so that his wife's young son (conceived with another man, but loved by Progresso all the same) will someday know the full story of his "father." The son may also have a chance to find the tens of millions in gold bullion that his "father" stole from an immoral investment bank in New York years earlier. Hence, the Brazilian hideaway.

Among the many ironies of Progresso's situation is that, though living in one of the world's premiere coffee-growing nations, he has a fanatical and pathological loathing for coffee. He detects any number of physical, emotional, and spiritual deformations in the world around him because of caffeine. (Helprin has said this is a mere literary device, but since he drinks no coffee himself the literal and allegorical meanings of "coffee" seem to come close together at various points.) Cruelly, "every child in the Western World is pressured to accept this drug." And Progresso has not been able to persuade even one person to forego the coffee habit, which he believes is more powerful than all the world's religions, than love, "perhaps stronger than the human soul itself." Progresso in exile, a person nauseated by the mere smell of brewing coffee, is amusing to no end, but he is not a happy man.

And yet he has lived a marvelous life. His early childhood on a farm in the Hudson valley had magic in it. He was too young for World War I, but became a fighter pilot who lived through physical and spiritual adventures in the sequel. Upon his return from war he marries a billionairess, with whom he is immensely happy but who eventually stops loving him. (The first sign of her infidelity is that she succumbs to the filthy caffeine habit.) Both before and after this marriage, Progresso goes through exotic episodes even though he is working as a highly successful-if highly eccentric-investment banker. His life story, which is told in meandering folds that loop back on one another from the vantage point of the eighty-year-old man, has been nothing if not spirited.

The blot on this otherwise bright existence, we learn late into the book, was the murder of Progresso's parents by some land speculators hoping to make a killing on a bridge planned to cross the Hudson River. For years, Progresso had only the barest of clues-some letters on the side of a private railroad car-about who did the deed. Only decades later watching a trolley in Rome does he realize that his youthful size led him to misread the letters. Subsequently, he traces the murders back to Eugene B. Edgar, the elderly president of his own investment firm.

Progresso has had to kill men before, in and out of combat, and as he takes his revenge by robbing the bank and executing the president, he knows he is damaging his own soul. Before he dies, the president himself correctly tells Progresso that he will not find comfort in the murder. But the child who came home to the farmhouse and found the two bodies executed by hired gunmen and laid down alongside them trying to will them back to life will not let him rest without vengeance. He snaps the bank president's neck: "My childhood was over, the circle was complete."

Children and childhood play a prominent role in this novel-not only Progresso and his "son" Funio, and the millions of children hooked on caffeine, but the spiritual energy of children and childhood that enlivens all of us for the rest of our days. In one of a hundred characteristically original scenes, Progresso is sent to meet the pope by his bank. Unlike most modern writers, Helprin does not waste a word on subjects like abortion, "moral rigidity," hypocrisy, imposing values, or any of the usual pagan complaints. Progresso meets a man and sees into his soul: "Given my difficulties with rank and hierarchy, I sometimes wonder why I had such a good time with the Pope." But the reason is that Progresso correctly intuits that someone in the pope's position must often think of his childhood.

After a simple dinner together, Progresso asks the pope about his parents. The pontiff is moved: "In all these years, no one has ever asked me about my father and my mother, and yet I think of them every day. Why did you ask?" Progresso's answer is simple, brilliantly simple:

God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon earth. As you don't have your own children, you must refer to that holy relation in memories dredged deep with great love.

Given that all this comes from a character who would better be described as a wag, an eccentric, at times almost a bravo, and a man in whom good and evil, great sanity and madness, are deeply intertwined, but who is often also uplifted by the sheer joy of life, the words carry even greater weight.

One proof of Helprin's sheer wizardry as a storyteller is the suspense he is able to maintain until the very end of the story. He takes a big chance in keeping the account of the bank robbery and flight to Brazil with the gold bullion for last. By that time, we know all about Progresso's life before and after the heist. Since Progresso is telling the tale, we also know that he survived the threats that crop up during the flight. Yet so great are Helprin's narrative gifts that you find yourself wondering how-or if-he will be able to handle the bandits, the storms, the mechanical problems. Most writers could not keep a reader turning the pages with that degree of excitement if the plot were unfolding in chronological order. That Helprin can do so when we already know the outcome is sheer magic.

Magic too is the musicality and sureness, the variety yet steadiness of vision in Helprin's story. Helprin seems to know everything worth knowing about warfare, finance, engineering, history, and several other fields. Yet his talent becomes lyrically tender and local when he writes about the Hudson Valley and New York City earlier in the century (In Winter's Tale, NYC is actually the site for the building up of the New Jerusalem-a project that, in the telling, seems plausible and very nearly comes off.) After a few days with one of his novels, life palpably contains all those possibilities the heart intuits: tragedy, pain, and horror, but also glory beyond all expression. No novelist alive writes with as much spirit as Helprin. Read him.