Refiner's Fire is a rather old-fashioned novel. It receives impressions of the outer world without cynicism or the self-confessed failure to understand, and Mark Helprin is so sure of his own narrative skills that the novel glows with his permanent presence. In other hands, this could all become breathless and boring, but Helprin escapes fatuity by being genuinely talented. It needs a kind of genius, I think, to accept orthodoxy and, by accepting it, to make it live again.

In other words, Helprin hasn't trod doggedly in the footsteps of other and older novelists. Everyone under the age of thirty-five now seems to be imitating the dry, toneless and wry manner of a Roth or an Updike: forgetting that if you imitate American writers who burned and faded in the 'sixties, your own writing will be so far out of sight in the 'seventies that it will be...