Mark Helprin Interview

MF: On one level, Freddy and Fredericka is a novel about work. They work their way across the United States washing dishes, driving railroad spikes, etc. And you talk a bit about the friction of work in the novel. Could you talk a bit about that now?

Mark Helprin: I think what I meant was the friction in life. People try to avoid friction by taking the easy way all the time. They want to be driven in a limousine, for example. I can't stand being driven, particularly in limousines. When I'm in a limousine I feel like I have African termites crawling all over my body. I'm extremely uncomfortable. They want to go into fancy restaurants and have waiters serve them fancy food. I can't stand that. They want to be pampered. I can't stand being pampered.

Why? Because what it makes you is something like a golden bug in a box. It's like being in a coffin almost. That's nice and pampered -- silk, it's quiet, perfectly comfortable. It's just contrary to why we're alive, and people strive and yearn for all these things that are actually like death. You don't move, you don't think, you aren't challenged, , you don't do things for yourself, you don't strain. You have no sense of accomplishment in this vision of life. You just have all these people doing things for you. You're immobile, and you sit there like something out of Star Trek, like a brain in a solution of salt and electrolytes, and you're thinking and giving commands and everyone's running around doing things for you. That's what power is in its essence. It's thought which moves people to do things.

So the very very powerful are in a sense the least privileged of all people because they don't get to do things that actually introduce them to the texture of life. They are separated by luxury and power and hierarchy. This is what Freddy and Fredericka learn is that they had been separated from real life by their position, their wealth, and their power.

MF: Your work seems to me to be half adventure, half romance wrapped up in satire. Sven Birkerts, in his New York Times review, referred to Freddy and Fredericka as picaresque.

Mark Helprin: Well, can I tell you how ignorant that is? You know how they say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing? Most modern critics and literary people stop there. They say "picaresque," and boy is that a short stop! They don't know what they're dealing with.

The paradigm of this book is the paradigm of the romance, not bodice ripper, not the romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Since the beginning of time, this has been the preferred method of story telling for human beings. It has various elements. People start out in paradise where time moves very slowly: Adam and Eve, Dante with Beatrice, Odysseus at home, Tom Jones at Squire Allworthy's, etc. Then because of knowledge that they gain or an accident or someone playing a trick on them, they are expelled from Paradise. They then embark upon a rite of passage to earn their way back. During the rite of passage many things happen: they meet doppelgangers; they meet the good hermit - Yoda in Star Wars, Virgil in Dante - a sympathetic and wise character who brings out the best in them and enables them to meet the challenges they face. They undergo amazing coincidences that in real life would probably never happen. They go through strange and bizarre lands - whether it be Odysseus or Tom Jones in London. Then, after meeting these tests, slaying the dragon, finding the chalice, they are transformed and come back to paradise in providential triumph and the first thing they do is father a child. Or, if they're a leader, a whole generation, or if they're royal, a whole people. And then the cycle starts all over again, because the children have to go through the same thing because that's what it is. It's growing up.

That makes the romance, which was the form of fiction predominant until it was simply killed by the appearance of realism in the middle of the nineteenth century. We've been educated to think that the conventions of realism are what literature is, but that's only 150 years old.

If you think of those elements I just mentioned with regard to Freddy and Fredericka, it was done exactly according to that.

So when people like Sven Birkerts say it's "picaresque," all that means is people are wandering around from place to place having adventures. That's all it means. They don't understand what it is. And this was written according to that paradigm not because I sat down and said I was going to write according to that paradigm, but because if you free yourself of the dominant convention and you just write the way human beings tell a story, that's what comes out. Because it arose from the way human beings tell a story.

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