Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire is a long ambitious novel of almost spectacular arbitrariness….

[Various episodes in the novel] might have comic possibilities but Helprin's tone is cool and unamused. A pattern does begin to form, and damned if it doesn't seem designed by Ayn Rand, all about the light of the West, the refining energy of a naturally endowed aristocracy: "There was nothing greater, thought Marshall, than men like this who had lasted, who were old, whose passions had been refined in fire and in ice and yet whose love was solid and gentle and true."…

Marshall is a Jew, and must be got back to Israel somehow, where perhaps he will find a new heaven and a new earth. But Helprin does not seem interested in Jews and his Israel is positively distasteful. Marshall is thrown into an Israeli regiment of criminals, idiots, sadistic officers, and a...