Winter's Tale

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, 673 pages

Winter's Tale is a strange story strangely told.  In a New York that never was, surrounded by a hurricane-like cloud wall that partially insulates it from the outside world, there lives a white horse able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  After the horse rescues a thief named Peter Lake from the vengeful gang leader Pearly Soames, the two form an instant bond.  To finance his escape from the city, Lake attempts to burgle the mansion of a wealthy newspaper publisher, only to unexpectedly encounter the publisher's lovely, dying daughter Beverly.  The two fall instantly, deliriously, magically in love, a love which transcends death and reaches beyond the stars.

The narrative is broken into pieces by numerous flashbacks, subplots, digressions, and mysteries.  Some of these pieces fit together better than others.  Oddly, the novel Winter's Tale most resembles may be Gravity's Rainbow, only where Pynchon's work is suffused with paranoid pessimism, Helprin's sparkles with enchanted delight.