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" Published in the October 2012 issue Mark Helprin and Martin Amis have absolutely nothing in common. You might point out the obvious \u2014 that they are both known to write novels, in English \u2014 but it would be about as useful to note that a dinghy and a battleship are both boats. And I wouldn&amp;#039;t bother the point further were it not for a random accident of timing. In 1995, they each had novels published: Amis released The Information and Helprin came out with Memoir from Antproof Case. The Information was the hot book that summer and, coming not long after London Fields, further established Amis as the writer in fashion. My memory is that no one talked about or read Helprin&amp;#039;s book, but maybe that&amp;#039;s just me. I read both and thought there must be something wrong with me. Helprin&amp;#039;s book was wonderful, rich, and emotional. A weird, inventive, and sprawling monument to the human imagination. Amis&amp;#039;s was another novel about novelists, and it bored me to no end. But the critics can&amp;#039;t be wrong! I thought as I went on with life. Fast-forward to now, when we are again visited by near-simultaneous novels by the two writers \u2014 In Sunlight and in Shadow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), by Helprin, and Lionel Asbo (Knopf, $26), by Amis. In the time since 1995, each has lurched around a bit. Helprin followed his reactionary heart and wrote the only beautiful speech Bob Dole ever gave, in which he announced his resignation from the Senate in 1996 to go and tilt at Bill Clinton, and lately he&amp;#039;s run afoul of the open-source crowd by (gasp!) endorsing something known as &amp;quot;copyright.&amp;quot; Positively antediluvian. And though they are contemporaries, Amis is a much more modern man, and in the meantime has moved to Brooklyn.  And speaking of Brooklyn, In Sunlight and in Shadow has the feeling and sweep of Thomas Wolfe, he who would walk across the bridge in the evening to drink in Manhattan, trilling to passersby that he had written 10,000 words that day, by hand while standing using the top of his icebox as a desk. Helprin has written another expansive novel, as if no one has yet alerted him that the novel is dead. Here it is, a poetic and likely enduring rendering of New York just after the Second World War, a love story that pines for love but even more fervently for an industrious and ascendant America that is no more and maybe never was. A novel in which people fall in love in an instant, a novel that inserts phrases like &amp;quot;paralytic beauty&amp;quot; into the dialogue of young men. Helprin spins a world whole and entire, and you can smell the air and see the quality of light and look at women with powerful eyes so intimately it&amp;#039;s uncomfortable. If Wolfe had lived to see the war and the country that emerged from it, he might have written something just like this. But Wolfe&amp;#039;s Brooklyn doesn&amp;#039;t much exist anymore, and though a sort of literature thrives there now, it is (to grossly generalize) smaller than ever, diffident, clever, and ironic. Solipsistic. And the brilliant novelist Amis of Money and The Rachel Papers now fits there somehow, for Lionel Asbo, with its promising premise of a lout who wins the lottery, is all of those aforementioned qualities. And add to that list forgettable. Which is to say that it is a novel of its time, and that Amis has adapted to these contracting and querulous times quite nicely. Lionel Asbo is by no means a disaster, and could not be, for Amis is too funny and smart for that to ever happen. Lionel himself is a terrific character, and his cockney soul as he unexpectedly comes into 139 million pounds almost gives the story enough vitality to make you care. But \u2014 and not to damn Amis for the affliction of most novels \u2014 it just doesn&amp;#039;t matter. But this, of course, is not to say that darkly comic novels can&amp;#039;t be consequential, and Amis&amp;#039;s prior work proves this. Is it too much to ask that things matter? For all its flirtation with nostalgia, In Sunlight and in Shadow matters. It is a novel, with all of the presumption and ambition and sense of transport that that word once carried when it was the boss. But Helprin&amp;#039;s influences tend to other centuries, to Shakespeare and Melville. And even as time has collapsed and the Internet has made everyone dumb, and the infernal assumption has become that people don&amp;#039;t care to read things that tax them, the world has remained just as full of stories as ever. In his work, Helprin takes the long view, and in that maybe there is a lesson for those who have given up on ambition. If his latest novel is a book out of time, perhaps it holds clues as to where the novel ought to go from here. MORE COMPELLING LITERATURE: On the Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a16070/mark-helprin-sunlight-and-shadow-review-1012/>