REFINER'S FIRE

With his subtitle, "The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling," Helprin winks at the picaresque, Torn Jones tradition in which this enormously ambitious, enormously talented, and enormously unsuccessful first novel is shakily grounded. Certainly Marshall's cosmopolitan odyssey has its picarequisite share of outlandish incident and ourtrageous coincidences: born to a dying Jewish refugee on a Palestine-bound ship in 1947; raised by a rich Jew in the Hudson Valley (where he wrestles with an eagle) and Jamaica (where, being a sharpshooter/genius, he leads an Anglo attack on Rastafarians); half-educated at Harvard; employed at a nightmare-like slaughterhouse; shipwrecked and happenstanced into the arms of his childhood sweetheart; propelled through Europe to Israel, where he serves—all unbeknownst—under his real father in the bureaucracy Israeli army, just in time to predict and survive (?) the October War. But neither Helprin nor Marshall has the high-spirited drive to send one set-piece snowballing into the next; we're constantly aware of the arbitrariness of the design and the sheer locomotive effort. And despite—or because of—his myriad endowments and extensive introspections, the mythic hero remains faceless, a distinct drawback when his fortunes swing toward the earthbound. Marshall's identity-search is clearly intended to work serio-comically on both personal (autobiographical?) and theme-dream/East-West levels—a tricky business. That it works on neither is no reflection on Helprin's basic narrative equipment, which, aside from slips into sophomorics (to an admiral: "Are you contemplating your naval problems?"), lyric pretensions, or New Yorker-ish listmaking, can dish up the ironies, dialects, and images needed to keep pace with his prodigious imagination. That imagination has been on better display in Helprin's short stories and will no doubt be on better display in sharper, less grandiose novels to come.