A narrator speaking to his dead beloved

“Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (“Love moved me, which makes me speak”). So declares Virgil to Dante at the outset of The Divine Comedy, explaining why he has come to serve as Dante’s guide through Hell: love set him in motion.

Mark Helprin takes this line from Canto II of Inferno as the epigraph for his new novel, Elegy in Blue: A Novel, and the choice, we come to see, is not decorative; it is thematic. In the pages that follow, Helprin attempts to write a book in which love is not merely the subject but the animating force of the prose itself, the reason to write at all.

The narrator of Elegy in Blue is an unnamed, recently retired 82-year-old Wall Street investment banker living in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as we meet him, he tells us that he is about to be killed. Since he has nothing to lose, he can say exactly what he wants. What he wants to say is addressed to Clare, his late wife. “When you write,” he confesses, “you have the secret, unfounded hope that somehow the magic of the written word can leap beyond the constraints of mortality, and that with divine leave even the dead can read what is in your heart.” Helprin has found a framing conceit that a certain Tuscan poet made use of over 700 years ago: the dying man writing to his dead beloved across the silence of the grave. Clare is his Beatrice. Elegy in Blue is his Comedy.

Dante’s shadow stretches across the novel. The narrator moves through a world in which the question of whether love can survive death is posed on nearly every page. His allusions befit a man who has lived long with great books: Homer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Whitman, H.G. Wells, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all make appearances. Ecclesiastes is present, implicitly, beneath his meditations on the leveling that awaits us all. “In the end we stand with them in the same line,” the narrator says, “in silence and in the dark, with no cutting in.” Yet the Dantean frame remains paramount. When the narrator writes of hoping to “join with others in the world of shades,” or invokes Inferno’s most famous line in confessing that he has given up hope, the Comedy is quietly proposed as a counterweight to Ecclesiastes’s existential despair: perhaps it is possible to pass through Hell and reunite with one’s loved ones in Heaven.

Helprin’s prose, at its finest, fully earns this literary company. The novel opens with a beautiful, rhapsodic passage on the sky above Brooklyn on a perfect October afternoon. As the narrator recalls, thousands of geese, too high to be seen clearly, passed over the city on their southward migration, their calls drifting down “faintly, beautifully, mournfully” through the unobstructed air. His wife and infant son were a few flights below, waiting. Here, Helprin is doing what only the best lyric novelists can do: catching a moment of ordinary happiness with such precision that it becomes the axis around which a whole life turns. That it is followed by death and loss and violence only deepens the pathos.

Elegy in Blue: A Novel; By Mark Helprin; Abrams Press; 256 pp.; $28.00

The narrator’s voice is the novel’s great achievement. At its best, it has a formal, even old-fashioned elegance that carries genuine emotion without sentimentality. The meditations on his early life, on near-penury in a vast, art-filled former stable on the Hudson after his father’s death in the war; on a summer in a sourball candy factory in New Jersey, have the quality of the best American memoirs: specific, digressive, and alive to the comedy and tenderness of ordinary life. (The sourball factory could stand alongside Philip Roth’s Newark glove factory in American Pastoral as a portrait of midcentury industrial New Jersey.)

Like an older, less philosophical, more lyrical Moses Herzog, our speaker is a man sorting through memory, assembling meaning from fragments, and finding not consolation, exactly, but something stranger and more honest. Apothegms accumulate: “Sacrifice and devotion, by themselves, wholly unassisted, can kindle and keep light where by all accounts a light cannot be kept”; “Pity the very rich if only because the things they own, own them”; “Grief is the fully fledged recognition of reality, and as such is elemental and unalloyable.” These are sentences to take out the highlighter for.

The novel’s second movement grows darker. The narrator’s son Charlie, the laughing infant of the Brooklyn Heights rooftop, dies in the Iraq War. The old man becomes wealthy, loses his wealth, shoots someone, and becomes “the One-Percent Vigilante” in the tabloids. Is he a villain or a hero? He refuses to say definitively, leaving the judgment to readers. “When no one comes to save you or those close to you,” he asks, “must you go to slaughter like lambs?” This is the question the novel circles around without quite resolving; it is the kind of question that can be asked seriously only by a novelist who is willing not to answer it.

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Helprin’s sense of humor is one of the novel’s pleasures. Some names and titles in the narrator’s world could have come from a Borscht Belt-ified Wes Anderson movie, including a head of M&A named Bret Klown (“He was good, but no one took him seriously”) and a law firm called Moses and Meyers that prompts a riff on what clients a firm named Moses and Jesus might attract. There is a rant about the decline of New York bagels (anyone who remembers H&H will nod mournfully) and cinematic set-pieces with screenplay directions, “Freeze the frame”; “End freeze-frame”, that echo the stage-direction passages in Moby-Dick. These touches are not incidental. Helprin understands, as Dante did, that no elegy worthy of the name excludes comedy, that rhapsody and elegy are complements, “just as when a broken heart still beats.”

Mark Helprin. (Courtesy Mark Helprin)

What stays with us after reading Elegy in Blue is not the plot, but the voice, and the question it keeps returning to: whether the line between the living and the dead is truly impassable. President Abraham Lincoln called writing “the great invention of the world,” because it is still the best means we have in our irrepressible attempts to “converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space.” The narrator of Elegy in Blue believes it too, though he cannot prove it, and neither can we. That is the belief that pulses in the novel’s heart. Love moved him, which makes him speak. Love moves us, reading him, which is what writing, from Dante’s time to ours, is finally for.

Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.