This book made me angry.

There, I said it.

I loved Helprin, especially A Soldier of the Great War. I tolerated two-dimensional female characters and wandering plots just for the opportunity to feed on his magnificent prose. There was no modern peer for his descriptions of the Alps or gilded age New York City.

But then came Freddy and Fredericka, which I barely tolerated, and then this cumbersome lump of dross.

I cannot begin to express what an astonishingly bad book this is. Characters so wooden I wanted to carve them into bat and knock myself out just for the sense of relief. A plot that would have been hackneyed in 1946. And sheer, unadulterated boringness.

But the most offensive part is that his great lyrical gift has turned into absurdity. His characters are incapable of expressing emotion, or even making us give a s**t whether the exist or die in a hail of gunfire. This is a fatal flaw in a love story, where at the very minimum we should expect characters capable of evoking and expressing emotion through their own thoughts, speech and deeds. As a result, Helprin vainly tries to make their preposterous love believable by ceaseless over-narration.

Here's a tip: If you have to write the phrase "They loved as no others had loved before", you have lost. If you write it every 2-3 pages, you make us want to commit some sort of ceremonial act of self-violence simply for the escape.

Show us, don't tell us.

I am done with Helprin.